The Park Service: Book One of The Park Service Trilogy (15 page)

“Dive in,” she calls. “You’ll love it. I promise. The water feels like cool silk against your skin.”

I strip off my shirt and hop free of my new pants, almost pulling off my undershorts, too, remembering how Jimmy and I swam naked, but I blush thinking about it and leave them on. Piling my clothes in a heap on the dock, I dive in after her.

The cold water shocks me sober.

There’s something I should be thinking about now, I know there is, but before it floats to the surface of my mind, Hannah appears from underwater in front of me, her hair slicked away from porcelain features, her red lips parted, her teeth glinting white in the moonlight as she spits water in my face.

“Try to catch me if you can,” she says, giggling.

She takes off. I swim after her, the moon shattering into a million miniatures of itself as I stroke across the black water. All I can think about is Hannah, Hannah wanting me to chase, Hannah ahead of me nearly naked in the lake.

I overtake her and wrap my arms around her from behind. She turns, wraps hers around me, her body warm and inviting in the cool lake. In each other’s arms, we float in a shimmering sea of moonlight and our breath blows hot against the cold air rising from the lake, mixing together like smoke between us.

I lean forward and close the distance and touch my lips to hers. She takes me in and we kiss, long and deep, our tongues searching one another. She tastes sweet and oh so much more intoxicating than any port could ever be.

Hannah—my sweet, sweet, Hannah.

CHAPTER 25
Dr. Radcliffe

Jimmy isn’t in his room.

A shaft of morning sun landing on the untouched bed and his borrowed clothes sitting folded on its end.

I search the house but it’s empty. I search the yard but see no sign of either Jimmy or Junior. I hike the bluff to our camp. Jimmy’s pack is gone. My empty pack sits propped beside the wind-felled log, right where I left it the other morning when I lied to Jimmy about seeing Hannah play tennis. I feel absolutely terrible about letting him walk away from the table last night without a word.

When I get back to the lake house, Hannah is standing at the edge of the dock, her white dress flapping in the wind and hugging her curves. I come to stand beside her.

“I can’t find Jimmy,” I say.

Hannah stands with perfect posture, her chin raised to the wind and her red hair waving behind her on the breeze.

“Did you hear me? Jimmy’s gone.”

She turns to me.

“Gloria said he made camp in the woods not far from her cottage. Just down the beach there a ways. She brought him food and supplies this morning. He’ll be fine.”

I touch her arm.

“Hannah, what did you mean last night when you said you’d been waiting for me?”

“Daddy will explain everything,” she says.

“When can I talk to him then?”

With one graceful motion, she lifts her arm out over the water and points. I follow her finger and skylight a boat in the distance growing ever so slow and steady as it approaches. Hannah stands close beside me and I wonder if she can tell that I’m nervous, if she can smell my sweat. I can smell the soap on her skin and a light perfume in her hair and the wind presses her dress against her just enough to expose the curve of her breasts. I want to kiss her again and feel her in my arms. I’m nervous to meet her father, and I don’t know if it’s because of the questions I have for him, or because I can’t stop thinking about kissing his daughter.

The boat comes closer into view—

It’s an antique wooden motorboat like some I’ve seen in educationals from the twentieth century. The bow is polished wood with brass fixtures reflecting the sun. It must be powered by electric motors for the boat moves across the water without sound. Two figures sit in the boat with perfect posture, like dignitaries on some parade float.

I see right away they’re Hannah’s mother and father.

Her mother has Hannah’s red hair, and she gracefully lifts a hand to wave. She might be Hannah’s own future reflection cast years from now across the lake. Her father, piloting the boat, has silver hair that looks almost metallic in the glint of the sun. Something about his face seems familiar to me, even from such a distance. I lift my hand to shade my eyes and focus on his features. As the boat moves closer, the outline of his face evolves and his nose comes into view. Then the arch of his brow. Lastly, I see the blue sparkle of his irises shining like two Benitoite lanterns in his shaded sockets. He turns and says something to his wife and when he looks back, his blue eyes flicker three times as he blinks.

I know who he reminds me of—Dr. Radcliffe.

“Is your father related to Dr. Radcliffe?”

Hannah turns to me. “My father is Dr. Radcliffe.”

“I knew it. He is related then. He must be a descendant of Dr. Robert Radcliffe, the founder of Holocene II?”

“No,” she says, a smile curling around her lips, “he is the same Dr. Robert Radcliffe who founded Holocene II.”

Before I can ask her what she means, the bow of the boat sinks into the water as it slows and glides past us and comes to rest with perfect precision beside the dock. A step plate folds out on silent mechanical hinges and secures the boat to the dock with some kind of magnetic connection. Dr. Radcliffe steps down onto the dock and turns to take his wife’s hand and she steps down beside him.

Then they turn and stand before us. He’s not much older than the Dr. Radcliffe I saw in the founder’s video they showed us on testing day, and when he smiles and blinks at me, I know it’s him, even though it’s impossible because that video was recorded nine hundred years ago.

“Dr. Radcliffe?”

“You must have many questions,” he says, nodding his head and blinking. “Trust that they will all be answered in time. But first let me welcome you. We had given you up for gone. This is my wife, Catherine.”

She stretches out her delicate hand and I take it in mine. She looks so much like an older version of Hannah that I can’t stop looking back and forth between the two and comparing.

Dr. Radcliffe wraps his arm around me and leads me from the dock. Hannah and her mother stay behind chatting.

“I hope Hannah has made you comfortable here,” he says, smiling down at me. “Your journey looks quite well on you, young man. Let’s retire to my study; I’ll clear up a few things.”

He shows me to his study and asks me if I’m thirsty and I say that I am even though I’m not. He leaves to fetch us iced tea. My mind is running with questions, my pulse races. I need to steady my nerves. I walk around the study and inspect the walls of books. From floor to ceiling they’re stacked in no certain order from Socrates to Charles Darwin and everything in between, including the plays of Tennessee Williams and the works of William Shakespeare. I’ve dreamed of reading books like this. Real books bound in leather, crisp pages yellowed with time. Not the sterile graphite letters displayed on my lesson slate down in Holocene II. Spotting an ancient leather-bound collection entitled
The Complete Works of Leo Tolstoy
, I slide out the first book of four comprising
War and Peace
. I open the cover and look at the title page. The English translation I’m holding was printed in 1910. I can’t imagine it—something that old resting in my hand. I want to sit and read it, maybe lock myself inside the study and read them all.

Dr. Radcliffe steps through the door and closes it again.

I snap the book closed and slide it back into its slot.

He hands me an iced tea.

“Good choice,” he says, indicating the book with a nod. “Have you read it?”

“It wasn’t in the Foundation library,” I say, nervous.

“Oh, yes, that’s right,” he says, as if just remembering who I am. “Well, you’ll have plenty of time to read them now. Let’s take a seat and have a chat, shall we?”

He leads me to a brocaded chair beside the fire. I sit; he sits next to me. I watch the gas flames dance in the fireplace shadows. He sips his tea, I sip mine. He slides a polished-agate coaster free from a stack of coasters on the table and places his glass down on it. I slide a coaster free and place mine next to his, and our glasses sit there side by side, catching the light filtering through the study windows, the ice cubes swirling slow and then finally coming to rest in the amber tea. The room is silent except for a clock ticking loudly somewhere on a shelf.

Dr. Radcliffe clears his throat.

“Well then, let’s start at the very beginning and I’ll do my best to explain how we’ve arrived where we’re sitting here today. Sound good?”

“Okay,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

“Many years ago,” he says, his voice grave, his tone that of one beginning a speech, “before we were locked underground, I was trusted to lead a very important venture between private enterprise and our government.”

“Holocene II, right?”

“That’s right,” he says.

“That’s nothing new,” I say.

“Hear me out, lad. There’ll be plenty that’s new.”

“Sorry. Okay. Go on.”

“Good. So, many of us, mostly men who had become very wealthy in biotechnology and energy science, believed that we were on the verge of making great leaps in human longevity.”

“Lifespan?”

“Boy, let me talk.”

“Sorry ...”

“These advancements in longevity, or lifespan as you say, appealed to many people in positions of power for the obvious reasons. Men have always sought ways to defy their mortality, always. Even I. But my interest was for other reasons. You see, the planet had fallen victim to an emerging catastrophe that was centuries in the making. Our populations had swollen to record levels—levels not even imagined possible just decades before. Small groups of people in the world controlled nearly all the world’s resources. Billions of others lived in complete poverty, working almost as slaves to provide the luxuries my peers took for granted. And beyond the human suffering, there was an even greater cost. We were quickly destroying the planet.”

“You mean global warming.”

“Yes. That and worse.”

“But I’ve read all this in lesson slates.”

“You’re not a very patient fellow, are you?”

“I just want to know what’s going on.”

“Listen and you’ll find out.”

“Okay. Go on—go on.”

“One of my companies had been making great progress with senescence and liquid computers.”

“Senescence?”

“Aging. Biology. Biotech, my boy. It was the new frontier. We had created computers that could be injected into the body, becoming part of the human immune system. Tiny computers that reproduce themselves. Computers smaller than a white blood cell. Computers powered by the very glucose that powers our own cells. And we believed that these computers would make man immortal, or as immortal as anyone should ever want to be. We learned to rewire human DNA, allowing cells to reproduce without the telomeres shortening, totally eliminating the Hayflick limit that causes us to age. But cancer, you might ask, what of cancer?”

He pauses, leans forward, gulps his tea.

“We discovered that the aging process is partly a defense against cancer, and when we removed the limits on cell division, test subjects were overrun with cancers. But with this new liquid-computer tech, we solved the cancer problem. Once injected, these computers search out diseased cells, including cancerous cells, and they attach to the cell wall and release a protein that causes the bad cell to destroy itself. And we did it. We made it work, I tell you. First on rats, then on monkeys. Then we made it work on ourselves. We extended our lives a hundred years. Then five hundred. Now, we’ve refined the serum and we can extend a human life to almost a millennium. I was the first human to undergo the treatment and that was over nine hundred years ago.”

“Wait just a minute,” I say, not believing what I’m hearing. “You’re telling me that you’re nine hundred years old?”

My question hangs in the room. There’s a long silence and all I can hear is the ticking of the clock. Tick-tick-tick ...

“Nine hundred and seventy-three last May,” he says.

“I don’t believe you.”

“That doesn’t make it any less true,” he says.

“Well, if it is true, then I don’t understand. We’re all taught in Holocene II that we work until we’re thirty-five and then retire to Eden. We don’t grow old so we don’t burden society, so we don’t overuse limited resources. But here you are almost a thousand years old now? No sickness, you say? No burden? Please, just tell me what’s happened. I don’t understand.”

“Here, maybe some slides will help ...”

Reaching to the table, he slides open a drawer and removes a small remote. He presses a button and the fire dies. Then blackout shades lower in front of the windows and the light disappears from the study in a retreating line that runs like a wave of shadow over me and the glasses of tea between us, and over Dr. Radcliffe until the last crack of light is sucked through the bottom of the shades and all is dim. A screen drops from the ceiling and lowers in front of us.

He clicks a button and an image flicks onto the screen—

An aerial photo of the ocean showing an island of garbage of all kinds floating off to the horizon.

“Increased ocean carbon killed the coral reefs, killed the sea life. A billion people were short of protein.”

He clicks another image on the screen—

An image of mass exodus, refugees lined up as far as the dusty horizon to receive bags of biscuit powder being handed out from air-dropped pallets being guarded by U.S. soldiers.

“Even genetically engineered agriculture had no chance of holding off mass starvation with rapidly increasing populations. And birth rates actually rose, if you can believe it. Seems the hungrier people got, the more children they had.”

Click—

Forklifts and dozers methodically pushing a wall of bodies, wooden and swollen, tumbling and piling into pits.

“Overuse of antibiotics created resistant staph and these bacteria borrowed our own DNA to become hyper-infectious. Epidemics spread through cities in waves of putrid death not imagined since the Black Plague.”

Click—

Bodies in burning tenement doorways, tanks, and armored trucks passing through deserted streets.

“Here we had known centuries of peace like none before, and we rewarded this good fortune by reproducing at record levels, consuming the planet. And soon, scarcity of resources led us back to our barbaric roots. But this time with better weapons. And this is why I agreed to oversee Holocene II.”

I look at the screen, the bodies, the desolation.

“But I thought we were a biological research center?”

“We were,” he says. “We are.”

“So how are we connected to the War? And how are you here after all these years? And why is there no ice up here?”

“That’s what I’m getting at, young man,” he says, his voice irritated in the dark beside me. “Try to show some patience.”

“Of course. Go on, please.”

“First, I’m a pacifist, Aubrey. You must know this. I’m a scientist, a lover of nature, and my entire life has always been about working to improve the planet and our life on it. And that is why I agreed to do the research I did in Holocene II. We believed the overpopulation problem was really a health and education problem. We believed that an educated and healthy society would lead to lower birth rates and manageable resource practices. And in my innocence, I imagined a perfect world where humans lived to be a thousand, where populations were stable and small—a utopia where a man’s wisdom could grow for a millennium before passing the torch to a new generation. I believed in a world of peace. But while we were doing our work in Holocene II, the world was anything but peaceful. We sucked the Earth dry of its oil reserves and built nuclear power plants at record levels in spite of the risks.”