Spiral

Jake tried to get inside the old man’s skin. How many times had Liam stood in this hall over the years? The New York Times did a survey, asking where the greatest Grateful Dead show ever was. The answer was Barton Hall, 1977. Liam would have been what? In his fifties then?

Liam listened almost exclusively to old Irish folk tunes, sad, sonorous ballads about lost love and delayed revenge, but he and Jake had once talked about the music of the sixties and early seventies. Jake had been surprised by Liam’s encyclopedic knowledge of everything from Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk scene through the Byrds, the Beatles, and the Grateful Dead. Jake had said it was a revolutionary time, but Liam had a different take. He said it wasn’t a revolutionary period in music at all. Rather, it was a reactionary one-a throwback to when the popular art of a society was a dialogue about the issues of the day, not simply bread and circuses.

Liam’s take on things always made you think, whether you agreed with him or not. Jake rarely emerged from their wideranging discussions with his initial perspective intact.

Jake was going to miss him like hell.

A voice behind him: “Professor Sterling? You ready?”

BECRAFT LED THE WAY AS THEY WALKED DOWN EAST AVENUE toward Liam’s laboratory in the Physical Sciences Complex. The air was crisp and cold, carrying the scent of autumn leaves. The sun was out, normally a cause for celebration in perennially cloudy upstate New York, but today it seemed garish.

To their right was the Andrew Dickson White House, named after Cornell’s first president, followed by Rockefeller Hall, built in 1906 with $274,494 from John D. Rockefeller. To their left was the Arts Quad, a large open space overseen by a statue of Ezra Cornell. It was surrounded by a mix of old and new buildings, some dating back to the university’s founding in 1865.

Below the Arts Quad and past the library was the “Libe Slope,” a steep hill that ran from the edge of the library down to the West Campus dorms. This was the site of the traditional end-of-the-year blowout party that invariably filled the Gannett Health Services center with overindulgent undergrads. Beyond Libe Slope and the dorms was the eclectic mix of buildings and houses that made up downtown Ithaca, and beyond that the wide, flat expanse of Cayuga Lake.

They turned right, toward the stone-and-steel façade of the Physical Sciences Complex, tucked in between Baker, Clark, and Rockefeller halls. Five minutes later they arrived at Liam’s lab. A uniformed officer stood guard outside. Technically, B24F was one of Jake’s labs, but in practice it was Liam’s domain. Jake had arranged for the space, saving Liam the trouble and paperwork. Liam was never an empire builder, always preferring to keep a low profile. He’d never bought into the science-as-industry model, where progress came by having a swarm of students and post-docs toiling away, picking a field clean like locusts. Even at the height of his career, the world’s leading expert on fungi was a perennial outsider, always preferring to work with just one or two students, lost in the unknown, tracking the craziest, most interesting idea he could find. His was so different from Jake’s way. Liam threw the long ball. Jake ran it right up the middle, making a few yards each carry.

Becraft said, “Professor Sterling, is there anything in here that could be dangerous? Anything potentially explosive? Any chemicals we should be aware of?”

“No, nothing beyond the usual.”

“Usual?”

“Bottles of reagents, maybe some syringes, things like that.”

He nodded. “Okay, then go ahead. Open the door.”

Jake slid his ID through the reader, and the door clicked open. Becraft flipped the switch, illuminating the rectangular space, twenty feet wide and twice that deep. The room was orderly and deathly still. There was a laptop on the desk in the corner, the screen blank. The opposite wall was lined with three lab benches, the shelves packed with pipettes, flasks of reagents, and sample cuvettes. And in the center of it all, the three huge mandalas of the gardens of decay. Jake always thought they looked like a giant painting by Klee, a spellbinding tapestry of complex mixtures of greens and yellows tucked between the narrow passageways down which the Crawlers ran.

“That’s what you told me about?” Becraft asked. “The gardens of…”

“Decay. That’s them. Each square is a different kind of fungus. Genetically engineered to cause the decay of one kind of trash or another.”

“Incredible,” Becraft said. But then Jake saw his gaze change. “Professor Sterling, speed is important in a case like this. If there’s something to be found, we want it now instead of later. Understand?”

“Sure. Of course.”