The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O.. Nicole Galland

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СКАЧАТЬ TRANSLATIONS out of a cabinet and went to find her. She had spread all of her matcha-making whisks and paraphernalia out on the counter.

      “Herbs,” I said.

      She looked up and gazed at me in the mirror.

      “Just a thought,” I added.

      “What about them?”

      “Witches were obsessed with them.”

      “It is a familiar stereotype,” she pointed out, and returned her attention to drying her matcha gear.

      “One based on reality. All of our research points to it.” I rattled the folders in the air, as if this would lend authority to my words. “I thought of it when the fragrance of that tea filled my nostrils. Powerful stuff, fragrances.”

      “Yes,” she said drily, “so perhaps you should be recruiting the descendants of famous perfumers, or incense-makers, rather than those of famous non-witches hanged in Salem.”

      Taking the hint, I used the facilities and moved on. As I was walking back to my apartment, folders tucked under my arm, I had time to ponder Tristan’s statement we need to clear a path for the tanks. Given his military background, my mind had immediately flashed up an image of a column of huge armored military vehicles thundering through the building. But of course he didn’t mean that kind of tank. He meant a large vessel for holding fluids. To be specific, for holding liquid helium.

      When I returned to the building the next day, my keycard didn’t work. This was due to the disappearance of the entire keycard-reading machine. In its stead was a contraption, apparently some kind of eyeball scanner. I went around back and pounded on the loading dock door until Tristan let me in. “New perimeter security,” he explained. “Max will get you squared away.”

      “Who’s Max?”

      Tristan was leading me down a broad open corridor that had been sledgehammered through the building overnight. It terminated in the ruins of the conference room. A huge square hole, perhaps fifteen feet on a side, had been cut through the floor, and yellow caution tape strung up around it to prevent people from falling through into the cellar. Hard at work down there were what appeared to be the offspring of a Benetton ad and a UPS commercial: four attractive, buff young men in nondescript brown uniforms, one African-American, one Asian (Korean?), one Hispanic, one with a Persian aspect, all impeccably kitted out with eye and ear protection. Two of them were framing in a wall with steel studs, and the other two were wrestling with cables. Tristan hailed them and they paused in their labors to greet me briefly. To a man, each identified himself as Max.

      “What, do they row for the DODO crew team?” I asked, when they had returned to their work.

      “Classified,” Tristan said. When I made a face, he added quietly, “Don’t talk shop in front of them. They know it’s a physics experiment but they don’t know about the magic.” Then he nodded at a work party of Hispanic men busy heaving shattered drywall and rolls of nasty old carpet into huge rolling bins for disposal. “And those guys are from the sidewalk in front of Home Depot. If my higher-ups knew . . .” He shook his head.

      I was busy gazing at my colleague in a somewhat new light. Until I saw him in command of people and a place, there had been, truth be told, no evidence that Tristan Lyons wasn’t merely a convincing psychopath renting a tawdry room in an obsolete office building for unsavory purposes that could have endangered my life. The possibility had never entered my mind, but in retrospect, it really should have. I’d been a sucker for both the smile and the paycheck. I still consider it pure dumb luck that my trust had been well placed.

      Journal Entry of

      Rebecca East-Oda

      MARCH 29

      Temperature 49F, sunny, mild, very still. Barometer steady.

      Lettuce coming along nicely; yesterday, planted peppers, Swiss chard, radishes. Weathervane needs fixing.

      Working on the native-herb garden in the front corner of the yard. Already thriving: thyme, hyssop, spearmint, lemon balm, fennel, chamomile, marjoram. Must add: lavender, ambrosia, valerian, mugwort, pennyroyal, gillyflower, and (when it’s warmer) sweet basil. Might take out the Japanese moss to make room, and bring Mei’s bonsai indoors, now that Frank has lost interest.

      They are continuing with the ODEC, on a magnitude I can barely fathom. Frank is happily preoccupied with something I cannot believe will actually ever come to anything, but it is good to see him absorbed in work.

      Diachronicle

      DAYS 245–290 (SPRING, YEAR 1)

      In which constructive developments continue

      I BEGAN TO HELP THE Maxes and Tristan complete construction of the ODEC under Oda-sensei’s guidance. The memory, now, of such tomboyishness, freedom of movement, the liberty of a day innocently alone with unmarried young men, and above all, the virtue of labor—these things make me almost pant with longing today, as I sit here breathing the fumes from this stinking whale oil lamp in my whale-bone corset (very difficult to believe Victoria Regina is about to rule over half the planet dressed like this. Just saying.).

      As I had guessed, the “tanks” Tristan had referred to were industrial vessels made to contain thousands of gallons within their fiberglass walls. There were two of them, an inner nested within an outer, with a few inches’ separation between them. We had to cover both of them with insulation to keep the liquid helium from boiling away. This was a combination of four-by-eight-foot slabs of pink foam from Home Depot, and some kind of weird brew that you would mix up in a bucket by stirring two different chemicals together. Then it would expand enormously as it foamed up and stick to everything like Krazy Glue before it hardened.

      After it had been clad in its insulating jacket, the outer tank just fit through the hole cut through the floor of the former conference room, and rested on the cellar floor below, its upper part projecting up into the ground floor. Here the Maxes cut a rectangular hatch through it, and a matching one through the inner tank several inches away. They fiberglassed the two rectangles together to form a hollow door capable of being filled with liquid helium, and likewise sealed the jambs. Meanwhile, expensive-looking stuff kept showing up at the loading dock. I didn’t need a West Point physics degree to understand that this was cryogenics equipment.

      Though the new ODEC (the Mark II) was much bigger than Professor Oda’s cat-sized Mark I, it was recognizably the same machine. Instead of an inner plywood box with a cat bed and a cream saucer, this one had that inner tank, which was just large enough for one person to sit in a chair, or two to stand upright. Much of its volume was spoken for by what Tristan referred to, somewhat unnervingly, as “life support stuff.” I made a mental note to ask him about that later. Its walls, for the time being, were just bare fiberglass, as it had come from the factory. If the Mark I was any guide, however, those walls would soon be lined with circuit boards. I had overheard enough snatches of conversation between Oda and Tristan to know that these were being produced offsite and that some were already inbound, plastered with tracking numbers that Rebecca was checking several times a day. When they showed up, and when the Maxes installed them, they would be connected to the inevitable web of cables, which would be routed under the floor and then up into the server room. This was being bolted together and brought online by a trio of bearded men who all politely introduced themselves as Vladimir.

      Once the Vladimirs had bolted the vertical СКАЧАТЬ