Spiral

“We’re fine,” Jake said. He glanced at the speedometer-seventy-five. Fine, unless they crested a hill and found a tractor coming the other way.

“Please,” Vlad said. “I am convinced I will make a very good old man.”

Jake kept the gas on as they passed an abandoned farmhouse, the roof swaybacked and peppered with holes, the windows covered in rotting particleboard. A stack of rusted wheel rims in the yard had fallen over, spreading across the yard like poker chips on a blackjack table. An old grain silo stood in the field behind it, the front gone, save the metal staves like the rib cage of a long-dead animal.

“Why would anyone live out here when they don’t have to?” Jake asked.

“He likes a place to shoot his guns.” Vlad also had a thing for guns. The Cornell police arrested him once after they’d received calls of a strange man firing a pistol into Cascadilla Gorge. “What the hell are you doing?” the arresting officer had asked.

“Shooting at rocks.”

“Why?”

“Rocks don’t shoot back.”

Vlad tapped Jake on the shoulder. “Okay, slow down. There.”

JAKE PARKED BEHIND A BRAND-NEW JET-BLACK CADILLAC Escalade, and they started up the walk. Uncut weeds poked up between the stepping stones. At first glance, Harpo’s place blended in with the rest. The yard was full of junk like all the others, but this junkyard was more of a high-tech graveyard. Computer servers. Broken monitors. Various things Jake couldn’t identify for sure, but they looked like burned-out versions of what he saw in bio labs: centrifuges, hot plates, PCR cyclers. There was even a DNA synthesizer.

“We don’t tell him anything about why we want this,” Jake said. “We agree?”

“Don’t worry. He will not ask.”

The door to the house was new, with the flat brown paneling that Jake recognized as the vinyl covering of a reinforced steel door. There were two dead bolts in addition to the knob, and a small security camera above the door encased in a little black cage.

The front door opened before they could knock. A big man stood there, maybe six-three, two-fifty. Thick through the waist and even thicker through the chest. He wore sweatpants, orange Crocs on his feet, and a T-shirt advertising a Cambridge bar called the Plough & Stars. He had a Snickers bar in his hand.

It wasn’t hard to see where he got the name Harpo. On his head was a shock of curly white hair, almost like a fright wig. “This Jake?” he said to Vlad. “The Crawler guy?”

“He is the one.”

He welcomed them in, gregarious and open, a contrast to all the security measures. He threw an arm around Jake. “I love your little robots, would kill to get my hands on a few. You might sell me some? Been trying to pry some loose from Boris Badenov here,” he said with a glance at Vlad, “but he ain’t biting.” He let go of Jake, turned serious. “Think about it. I could make you good money-two hundred bucks apiece, easy. Conversation pieces for technophiles. You teach it to dance the Macarena to an MP3, I bet we could get five times that. What do you say? You interested?”

Jake passed, a bit too gruffly. He was already antsy. He just wanted to get the DNA sequenced and get back to Maggie.

Harpo took it gracefully. “Come on.”

The interior of Harpo’s house was a total contrast to the outside. The living room was well lit and relatively clean but completely devoid of furniture. Instead it was full of computer servers, most of them dark. “You want an HP BladeSystem c7000?” Harpo said, patting one of the silent server stacks. “I’ll sell it to you cheap. Got no use for them now. I ran a data-mining service for a while. We generated customer profiles based on Web surfing patterns, but now everyone’s gotten into that game. You want easy pickings, you gotta be in at the beginning. Selling something no one else does.” He smiled. “Like I’m doing now.”

“What do you sell?”

“You ever heard of vanity publishers? You write a book and the big houses won’t buy? For a fee, a vanity publisher will print your book for you, churn out a hundred copies, a thousand, whatever you pay for. Enough copies to give to your friends and pretend you’re a big-time author. Well, I’m a vanity publisher, too. But I publish in DNA.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning DNA publishing is your chance to expand your print run to astronomical scales. Any message you want, I’ll encode it in DNA, run PCR on it, and send you a billion copies.” He held up a small vial of clear liquid. “This one’s shipping today.”

“You’re kidding. Who buys this stuff?”

“You name it. Frustrated poets. Novelists. One woman had me make six billion copies of her poem, one for every human on the planet. It stank, by the way. All about calla lilies. Another guy, some religious nut, wanted the Sermon on the Mount. He carries a little mister with him, like for perfumes? Everywhere he goes, he gives a little squirt. Says he’s spreading peace and joy. But it pays the bills.”