AFTER THIS YOU AND YOUR PEERS COLLUSION WILL BE EXPOSED AND YOULL BE CHARGED WITH THE GREATEST FRAUD EVER PERPETRATED IN THIS CENTURY. YOU WILL BE DISCOVERED BUT I FEAR EVEN THIS ISN’T ENOUGH PUNISHMENT FOR WHAT YOU DESERVE.
He snorted a laugh at the missing apostrophe in “youll.”
This was a first for him. He’d certainly heard of other scientists receiving crass and intimidating notes from the right-wing or conspiratorially minded agitators who seemed to take up all the oxygen on the internet. Tony stayed out of all that, though. He hated politics. As far as he was concerned, all this fury directed at people taking passionless, unbiased measurements of phenomena was nothing more than the sad hobby of frustrated losers ranting into the ether. He imagined Gail’s response, some nerdy joke like “At least this balances out all the bras and panties you usually get!” Imagining her voice gave him comfort. Milling outside a Yale lecture hall years ago Tony found himself unexpectedly talking to a young woman, Black and wide-hipped with round breasts stretching a T-shirt with a picture of Lando Calrissian lying seductively on a bearskin rug. He thought she was gorgeous then and would continue to think that past a decade and two children whose faces grew into hers year by year.
This was the kind of woman you needed when the world was teeming with morons, and you got hate mail for studying the phase transitions of methane hydrates.
His eyes crept back to the beginning of the letter. “After this,” it began. After what? Tony wondered if he should call campus security. This seemed silly, though. He wasn’t worried about a guy being camped out in the bushes. Some idiot had scanned the Scripps faculty page on the website and picked his name out of a lineup.
He set the letter down on his desk, ready to forget about it for the rest of the day when he noticed something white with a pale yellowish tint on his right hand. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together and the substance sifted off. Still holding the envelope with his left, he now felt a remaining weight to it. There was something else inside.
Without thinking, he tilted the envelope over the desk to empty the rest of the contents. A powder of the same color, maybe a couple spoonfuls, spilled out onto the marred wooden surface.
It was impossible for Tony to remember how long he sat there staring at it, but it was a very long time. His mind, chaotic and symphonic only moments before, halted entirely.
This obviously wasn’t real. It was likely chalk or some other anodyne substance. This was an easy laugh for a sick crank.
He tried to think of everything he knew about Bacillus anthracis, but it wasn’t much. Cutaneous, pulmonary, or gastrointestinal methods of infection were all possible—but here he was just breathing, just sitting there, staring at his hands, some of it still on his fingers. But what were the odds that a clueless loser who couldn’t spell “youll” somehow had access or the wherewithal to cultivate Bacillus spores? Then again, the historical mortality rate had to be incredibly high. He became aware of a piece of food stuck in his teeth, leftover from lunch, and realized he was still just staring at the powder on his fingers.
As if born back into his surroundings, he looked up and around. He shared the lab in Nierenberg Hall on the east side of the Scripps campus with Niko, but since they only dealt in computer models they treated it as an overflow office. The cabinets that had once held equipment now stored files. The countertops that might have held aquariums of marine specimens now provided a home to mountains of paper flotsam. But there was still a working sink.
Tony stood, wondering if he could inadvertently wash the spores into someone’s drinking water. Because he had no answer to this question, he dismissed it and knocked the faucet on with his elbow. The powder disappeared under the scalding water. He emptied a handful of the pearled gel from the soap dispenser onto his palms and scrubbed until his skin was pink and painful.
When he finished, he dried his hands and dialed 911 from his cell phone. He’d barely explained the situation before the operator was putting him in touch with the FBI.
By the time he hung up, he was confused. The FBI was coming, but what about an ambulance? He remembered from the scares of 2001 that bacillus wasn’t contagious from person to person, so could he just drive to the hospital himself? He didn’t want to go anywhere near the substance, so he took Niko’s desk chair and sat by the opposite wall, as far away from his desk as he could, and wondered if he should lay a piece of plastic over the powder. Then again, he didn’t want to go near it. He perched forward with his arms crossed over his chest, hugging himself. Even though it was surely a hoax, almost definitely a hoax, maybe it wasn’t a hoax. The less he tried to think about this, the more he could only think about it. He felt a tickle in his throat. He wondered if in a few minutes he’d start coughing. Wishing for the antianxiety meds he’d dabbled with as an undergrad, he tried to focus on something else, and he wanted that to be his family.
But that wasn’t where his mind went. Instead, he was overcome by an image of tiny bubbles rising inexorably through dark water. It was what he’d seen just before he pulled the letter from the envelope. With this data set, the trend was becoming unmistakable. And powerful. He and Niko kept fiddling with the simulation, making the stresses milder, but in the end, the hypothetical hydrates kept coming apart. He tried to focus on other things: Gail working on her dissertation in the kitchen of their first rental home in La Jolla while he kept Holly—not Older One yet—distracted in the living room by handing her baby toys to suck on while he read research papers a paragraph at a time. Gail had Holly by day, so he took her by night. They both pursued their careers while they fed and burped this chubby babbling machine, and when she finally began going down at a reasonable hour, they’d watch DVRed episodes of Lost, which Gail claimed offended her as a reader of literature, even though she never let him watch without her.
When Catherine arrived they talked about how their girls would be the most dissimilar siblings, as fundamentally different as Gail and Corey. Older One got the hang of reading by age six, and she seemed in a competition with herself to comprehend the most challenging novel her young mind could follow. Only a first-grader, they had to take books away from her at bedtime. She objected to so little, she threw no tantrums, and yet she almost seemed to carry around a latent fear or stress that she would never manage to finish every great book in the world. He’d swing the door open to her bedroom, and her surprised face and big head of curls would go dark as she snapped off the flashlight she’d sneaked. The ways she put that unrelenting curiosity to work never failed to astonish Tony, like when Gail taught her what it meant to call something “gender essentialist,” and she began identifying everything in the modern world as “gendered essentialist,” including TV commercials, children’s shows, movies, all sports, and everything her uncle Corey ever said.
And her younger sister—Jesus Christ. Even as an infant she had a knack for the bold entrance and destructive tantrum. She was lighter-skinned than Holly, had a splash of spunky red-brown freckles on her cheeks and nose, and a beautiful red tint to her hair. She could charm an entire room or, if she didn’t like the vibe, as Gail put it, “She’d spit at us if she could get her lips to work.” Then she learned to talk, and in complete contrast to Older One, the words never stopped. They just came in an indomitable stream of thoughts, ideas, stories, questions, and wonders. And her crazy streak: When Niko, his wife, and some other friends had come over for dinner once, he and Gail had returned from the kitchen to find their youngest daughter bare-ass naked demonstrating her toddler gymnastics for the assembled guests, causing the rarest of lost tempers from her parents. But then, that was why she was a conqueror, a wild one, fearless and fierce, the Mother of Dragons.