Free The Curiosity by Stephen Kiernan Page A

miles away. Carthage maintained that his method would guarantee temperature consistency, but we knew he had another motive.
    That meant twenty hours with Billings on the trip south. On the overnight we did the proper, correct, appropriate thing: we got smashed.
    â€œDon’t worry, lovely, I’m not going to attempt some tawdry seduction on you,” he said, wobbling in the aisle against the sway of the train. “Altogether too much the scientist, don’t you know.” He flopped into the seat beside me. “Socially spastic, few deep allegiances, suspected of borderline Asperger’s. You know the lot. My brother aside, you’re the closest thing I have to a friend.”
    â€œExcuse me?”
    â€œWe’ve nine hundred miles to cover.” He held up a large bottle. “This seems like the best way.”
    â€œBourbon?”
    â€œYes, I drink like a Yank now, blast it.” He flashed his crooked-toothed grin at me. “But it does the trick.”
    I was won over completely. “At the risk of being too formal on you, Billings, could I go get us a couple of glasses?”
    â€œBrilliant.”
    We sipped and supped, we told old tales, we laughed ourselves weak.
    The following noon we chugged into customs to learn that Carthage’s slow train had been a masterstroke of media manipulation. Just over the border, American cameras stood in a line, reporters shouting questions. Anticipation had brought them to a froth.
    That meant my face appeared on a national magazine cover three days later, looking not scientific but hungover. Billings was pale as a frog’s belly. He even asked one reporter if he knew where a poor soul could get some tea.
    That welcome marked the beginning of a media avalanche. By the time we’d stowed the frozen man at Carthage’s Boston lab, we were nonstop with talk shows, radio interviews, meetings with reporters over breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It was more exhausting than fun, to tell the truth. More spectacle than substance. I felt like a magician, wiggling my hand over here so no one notices my deception over there.
    A week along, I was in a hotel pulling off a blouse before bed when I encountered an unfamiliar odor. I put the shirt to my face and discovered the sour scent of stress. Imagine declaring on TV with certainty things you harbor huge doubts about. I stuffed the blouse into the lower suitcase with my shoes. I had enough to contemplate besides the smell of my own fear.
    The science, to begin with. We ought to have been in the lab, not the TV studio. We were delaying all the potential discoveries, while traipsing around and proclaiming the extremely little that we knew.
    Something else also made me nervous. This was not some mute creature we’d found, some oddity like an oversize lobster or a giant squid. This was a human being. The research imperatives had to be ethically different. We found too many familiars.
    The boot, for example. Soon after settling in the Boston lab, we’d done a preliminary scan through the shell of hard-ice, and learned that the frozen man was wearing boots with the maker’s faded imprint on the heel. This wasn’t just any guy, I realized. It was a particular guy, with a particular life he’d died out of. He had a shoe size, there had been a place where he bought boots. Carthage saw only the media potential, or the possibility of funding from the boot company, if it still existed. Thus it became my job to find out everything I could about our frozen man. Even with two inches of ice encasing his body, there were many indicators: the clothes, muttonchop sideburns, height, and yes, boots. I remembered a friend’s cadaver dissection in medical school, how she was fine with all of it until she got to the hands. Then she encountered fingernails, ring marks, a thumb whose callus came from some unknown lifetime friction. The humanity of her assigned body was no longer deniable. That is what the