They clapped him on the back and shook his hand. Nobody could accuse him of cheating.
When the moment was old enough, Michaels raised his palms. The crowd became quiet. He thought about saying his poetic words. No. They didn’t have time. “OK, everybody. Look sharp. We’ve got an appointment to keep. It looks like we’ll be sending this watch back in half an hour.”
That night, Jennifer dreamed of her father. He was young. He was running down a smoky corridor with a flashlight – torch, he would say – calling for his wife, and her mother, Helen. There were rumbles of impending collapse. Jennifer wanted to call a warning but she was only a ghost from the future.
“Helen!” he called. “Helen!”
The walls began to collapse. Debris fell like tears. The larger chunks exploded on the floor. The light was snuffed out. The underground research centre had vanished. Like a gut expelling trapped air, the space had simply disappeared.
“Jennifer!” he called. “Jennifer!”
She couldn’t breathe.
She awoke and looked around. Her muscles ached. The air had a dull resonance, as though a great sound had come and gone. Had she screamed? Light and dark traded places as a cloud crossed the moon.
The night embraced her once more and, with trepidation, she fell asleep.
Professor Michaels offered his elbow to Jennifer as they approached the outer edge of the biome. They passed through a plastic curtain into its cool, wet interior. High above them was a domed transparent ceiling and, beyond it, the sandstone roof of the cave. Suspended light panels provided energy for the plants. The air conditioning drew a wind across them. They stirred like chimes.
They walked on. Jennifer waited for Michaels to speak. He said nothing. The gravel path meandered among exotic species that reached ten feet in the air. Below them were red, green and blue lines in the gravel, representing ten minute-, half-hour- and one-hour walks. Michaels followed blue.
“I would like you to meet an acquaintance of mine,” he said finally. They were near the centre.
“Who?”
“John Hartfield.”
Jennifer stopped. She knew the name. Hartfield was a millionaire who had earned his first fortune in race-horse breeding and his second in revolutionary cancer treatments. That was public knowledge. But he also had a third interest. He part-funded the Nevada Center with the US government.
“Is this meeting going to make or break my career?”
Michaels adjusted his glasses. “You’ve already made it, Jennifer.” Abruptly, he took her hand and kissed it. Jennifer smiled. Perhaps this was the intoxication of success. She looked into his seventy-year-old face and realised, as he smiled back, that he would have been a handsome man in his youth. “Take care of yourself.”
“And you,” she said, still holding his gaze. He backed away.
As she walked, the hedges became thinner. She entered a clearing with a beautiful pavilion at its centre. Its black eaves curled toward the roof like the helmet of a samurai. Around its perimeter was a wonderland of bridges that crossed hidden streams. She could hear the flutter and call of birds, but see none.
The pavilion had no walls. Its varnished wooden floor was empty.
“Good morning,” someone said.
She turned. Standing behind her was a man in his mid-forties. He wore a blue suit and a broad-brimmed hat, not ten-gallon, but close. His smile was lopsided and friendly. He was tall, but not very tall; thin, but not very thin. His eyes were cold and blue. The sun had bleached them. As he walked towards her, she noticed his limp. He had a cane.
“Good morning,” she said. “Mr Hartfield, I presume?”
“The same. What a beautiful day.”
He was very close now. She could smell his aftershave. She could see his hearing aid.
“Would you like to walk with me? Slowly, I’m afraid. My leg.”
She smiled. He had no accent but English was not his first language. She recalled her dream of the night before. Her father running through the doomed research centre. Looking for Helen, his wife, her mother, who was dead.
They walked for minute in silence. He said, “There was a time, many years ago, when I fell in love.”
“What was her name?”
He laughed and made an odd, dismissive wave with his cane. “Science was her name. It was Christmas 2002. I was in France. I bred horses. I was happy. But I began to develop headaches. They grew worse and worse. I went to my doctor and he diagnosed a brain tumour. It was cancerous.”
He paused as they passed a gardener, crouching to plant some bulbs as a small robot handed them over, one by one.
“Go on.”
“It was inoperable. They gave me six months to live. Give or take six months.” A smile touched his lips, then was gone. “I tried various therapies. Alternative treatments. Chinese medicines, Japanese pressure therapy, Indian remedies. Nothing helped. After six months, I was desperate and ready to try anything. I offered ten million dollars to anyone who could cure me.
“Of course, I received a vast number of communications from fakes, con-artists and idiots. But one letter, from an Argentine medical student, intrigued me. He had an idea for a surgical procedure using, in essence, legions of tiny robots, designed to hunt and destroy cancerous cells.”
“Orza’s nano-treatment,” Jennifer said quietly.
“Yes, it is quite famous now. Not so then. I gave him the money and all the resources he needed. He developed an experimental treatment. I was already experiencing blackouts, memory lapses and language problems. I was desperate. I took the treatment and it cured me.”
“I heard,” she ventured, uncertain of her role, “that the technique was rather imprecise in the beginning. Non-cancerous cells were also destroyed.”
Hartfield’s face was blank. “True. The same may be said for more traditional treatments, of course, such as chemotherapy. But the nano-treatment demonstrated to me the effectiveness of science. I fell in love with its conquering power. It was love at first bite.”
He smiled. To Jennifer, it was the smile of someone who did not know humour; someone
