with a photo of Maggie, Tim, and Kendall at a stock show with one of Kendall’s prize pigs. They all looked happy and beautiful and alive.
“I’m checking to see if the internet is up,” Teddy said. The browser flickered back to life. There were several unopened emails that had been sent in August, and dozens more began downloading. Then Teddy touched the phone app. He stared at it and held the phone away from him, as if it contained something frightening or incomprehensible.
“What?” Helen demanded.
“Mom called. Like two days ago.”
* * *
—
JÜRGEN STARK’S LABORATORY WAS in a remote section of central Pennsylvania, in Amish country. An occasional buggy clopped by the gates. The only billboards were stark passages of scripture. The air was clean and the fields were carefully tended and cornflowers lined the fences. It was a vision of a preindustrial world in which humanity had played a smaller role, serving as stewards of the land. Except for the religion, it was a vision of society that Jürgen fiercely endorsed.
The government car turned off the state road and pulled up to an iron gate. The steel barrier surrounding the acreage had been artfully planted so that it didn’t look like a prison or some federal fortification. The gate opened into a disinfectant chamber, where the car and its undercarriage were sprayed. They went through a second gate, where Henry and the driver were made to stand aside as guards vacuumed the trunk and the interior and power-washed the engine block—all of this, Henry realized, to keep out pathogens that might destroy the unique life forms that Jürgen was re-creating inside this compound.
Henry was met by a weathered middle-aged woman with cropped hair, wearing an Earth’s Guardians hat. Her name, Heidi, was embroidered on her shirt. “It’s an honor,” she told Henry. “Dr. Stark has often spoken of you. What great friends you are.”
Jürgen’s minimalist aesthetic was evident in the low-lying stone buildings that surrounded the campus. Gardens spilled over with unfamiliar flowers and vegetables. Hyacinths and lilies and tulips of novel colors were laid out in mulched beds. “This section alone represents nearly a hundred varieties of squash that have been brought back to life,” Heidi said. “Look at them, aren’t they amazing? You’ll have some in the soup tonight.” They walked through an apple orchard bearing fruit of unusual colors and sizes. “So much was lost to mindless civilization,” said Heidi.
A portion of the campus was a kind of zoo, although Heidi cautioned that the word should not be applied. “We only hold the animals until they have developed a sufficient population to be released into the wild. We settle them in the habitat where they once flourished and hope that they’ll make a go of it again. And here’s one of our greatest triumphs.” Heidi pointed to a wire cage the size of a boxcar containing about fifty red-eyed gray doves. “They’re passenger pigeons,” she said. “Once, the most common bird in America, then extinct for a hundred years. Jürgen brought them back. Just think about that. God made these creatures and we made them again. It’s truly the Lord’s work.”
Henry studied Heidi’s awed expression and thought how he must have looked like that once as well. It was the face of a true believer.
Jürgen was waiting in his office. “Tell Craig to make something wonderful,” he said to Heidi, as Henry came into the room. A glass wall jutted into a forest of red oak on the rocky banks of a creek. There were no pictures on the walls; nature itself was the art, sere and impersonal, like Jürgen.
“Did Heidi show you your lab?” Jürgen asked when they were alone.
“Not yet.”
“It’s not up to Fort Detrick standards, but we have the essentials.” Jürgen rarely smiled but he did so now, with an unfamiliar fond look in his eyes. “You know, Henry, I’ve often dreamed of this, that we would work together again.” Henry didn’t respond, so Jürgen continued: “We managed to obtain the same strains of poliovirus and EV 71 that you used in your hybrid. It shouldn’t be hard for you to bring it back to life. That’s what we do around here, as you’ve probably gathered.”
“ ‘It may be within my power to take a life. This awesome responsibility must be faced with great humility and awareness of my own frailty,’ ” Henry said. “ ‘Above all, I must not play at God.’ ”