The next year they insisted that he show steady progress toward a specific degree. That was his last year. Subsequently he went out and started his own company and did pretty well with it. He lived out in this house in Belmont with his wife, his sister and some kids, I could never tell exactly whose, wrote highly conceptual software, mostly for 32-bit personal computers and, every once in a while, helped me out with a problem.
It was past eleven when we got there and the house was mostly dark, but we could see him up on the third floor in his office, a kind of balcony surrounded by windows. He noticed us driving up; I stood there and waved since I didn't want to send the house into a frenzy by ringing the doorbell. He came down and opened the door.
“S.T.,” he said, “what a pleasure.” Completely genuine, as usual. His mutt came out and sniffed my knees. I was about to walk in when I realized that for once in my life I was in a house where children lived.
“I'm not sure if I should come in, Kelvin. I'm contaminated with a form of genetically engineered bacteria.”
Kelvin was the only person in the world I could just say that to straight faced, without giving him prior notice that we were venturing into the realm of the totally bizarre. He found it unremarkable.
“Dolmacher's?” he said.
Of course. Dolmacher would have done the same thing: thought of Kelvin.
“It's E. coli, with PCB-metabolizing plasmids, right?” he continued.
“If you say so.”
“What do I smell?”
“I unloaded some of it in the back of the truck. Into a bucket.”
“Just a sec.” Kelvin went into his garage and came out with a can of gasoline. Taking the shit-filled bucket out of the back of the truck, he poured gasoline into it, walked about ten feet away and threw a match at it. We all stood around and watched it for a few minutes, not saying much. The Fire Department came around; the Alzheimer's victim across the street had called in a chimney fire. We told them it was a chemical experiment and they left.
“I'll let you in the back door. We can talk in the basement,” Kelvin said, after it had burned down to ash.
We went into his basement, which was mostly full of electrical and electronic stuff. We sat around on stools and I put the sealed margarine tub up on his workbench. There was a naked light bulb hanging above it which filled the container with yellow light; the toxic turd cast a blunt shadow against the flower-patterned sides.
“Good. Dolmacher brought me a sample but he'd already weakened it pretty badly with antibiotics.”
“How do you know this one isn't weak?” I asked.
“It's well formed. If you were taking the kind of antibiotics that are effective against E. coli, you'd have diarrhea.”
Boone and Jim exchanged grins. “Looks like we came to the right place,” Boone said.
He was right. When it came to pure science, Boone and Jim had no idea what I was talking about. But Kelvin was as far ahead of me as I was of them.
“I'm sorry to come around at this time of night,” I said, “but ... well, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are talking about the end of the world here, aren't we?”
“That's what I asked Dolmacher. He said he wasn't sure. It may be a little too simple-minded to make the extremist possible assumption - that it'll convert all the salt in the earth's oceans to polychlorinated biphenyls.”
“Does Dolmacher know how to kill this bug?”
Kelvin smiled. “Probably. But he wasn't speaking in complete sentences. Had some undried blood on his pantlegs.”
“Damn, Kelvin, you should have made him sit down and talk.”
“He was armed,” Kelvin said, “and he showed up during Tommy's birthday party.”
“Oh.”
“Anything can be killed. You could dump huge amounts of toxins into the Harbor and poison it. But there's a Catch-22 involved. If you aren't Basco, you don't have the resources necessary for such a big project. And if you are Basco, you don't want to use such obvious methods because ... because of people like you, S.T.”
“Thanks. I feel a lot better.”
“Of course, now that you're dead, maybe they'll loosen up a little.”
“So what did Dolmacher come here for? Just to give you some warning?”
“Yes. And he phoned two days ago, between holding up drugstores. He managed to find some trimethoprim and that seems to kill the bug pretty effectively.”
“So why not dump a shitload of that into the Harbor?” Jim asked.
“We don't have a sufficient shitload,” Kelvin said. “No, I don't think that antibiotics are the answer. They are large, complex molecules, you know. Totally against Sangamon's Principle.”
“Kelvin, I am honored.”
“It's hard to assemble big complicated molecules in Harbor-sized quantities. The only way to do that is through genetic engineering - turning bacteria into chemical factories. That is exactly what we're competing against, an army of little poison factories - but we don't have an army. There is no rival bug making trimethoprim. So we have to find the equivalent of a nuclear weapon. Something simple and devastating.”
Here, Kelvin seemed to find something interesting in what he'd just said. “That's actually an idea,” he said. “If the infection got totally out of hand, we might have to save the world by detonating some nukes in the Harbor. We'd lose Boston but it would be worth it.”
At this point Jim and Boone had moved back into the shadows and were just watching Kelvin's performance open-mouthed. We heard the soles of someone's Dr. Dentons scraping against the linoleum upstairs, and then light spilled down the steps from the living room.
“Kelvin?” said a five-year-old kid, “can I have some cranraz?”
“Yes, honey. Use your She-Ra mug,” Kelvin said.
“Cranraz?” Boone asked.
“Cranberry-raspberry juice,” Kelvin explained. “I like this house, so let's not think in terms of nuclear weapons right off the bat. That was just supposed to be an analogy. We need to find some chemical susceptibility that these things have. And your sample here should make that a lot easier. I wish I had a better lab, though.”