The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [124]
“So when?” he quietly asked.
Guillaume exhaled. “I want to remake the vaccine with several alterations,” he said more calmly, “to make it more palatable to the human body. Three weeks should be enough.”
“Three weeks,” Lucien repeated as he began to consider his own options. He could take the train back to Vienna, but such a choice would damn him even more than Eduard’s death to a penance of guilt. He could remain as a bystander, offering his help, but this option felt equally weak and reprehensible, particularly as he thought of his earlier conversation with his father, and what his father had done for him when he was a child. He next considered taking the vaccine and knew that doing so was the only honorable choice; the thought of his own death barely made him pause, and the even smaller likelihood that the vaccine might work—if he survived—felt too remote to be a serious consideration. He would lend his hand to his flailing father, even at the risk of being pulled into the churning waters in which he struggled to stay afloat.
The air felt cool on his face—wet from tears—and he could detect a distant, echoing crescendo, a mounting tension that for the first time in years almost made him want to sing. “I’m here, Papa,” he whispered and then turned and kneeled, gripping his father’s shoulders as if to prop them both up. “I will take the vaccine with you.”
Guillaume slowly stood and kissed each of his cheeks, and in his eyes Lucien could see his own. “Great truth requires great sacrifice”—he nodded—“and today you’ve proven your capacity for both.”
OVER THE NEXT two weeks, Guillaume assembled several new furnaces, which along with test tubes, pans, and bains-marie all had to be tested and calibrated. Lucien was charged with water distillation, a time-consuming procedure in which barrels of water had to be boiled and strained through charcoal and slow-sand filters. He helped organize and measure vials of cinnabar and sulfur, silver and lead, and any number of vegetative extracts, including one from a Mongolian orchid that Guillaume insisted was the most poisonous substance on the earth. Once the procedures began, with a flame burning under every piece of equipment—and a wave of summer heat outside, as though a higher power had placed a magnifying glass over the proceedings—the lab became unbearable; it was a noxious jungle, dank and steaming, and Lucien could not enter without retching. Yet even in this most wretched condition, he was astonished by the speed and agility with which his father—who seemed impervious to the heat and the smell—moved from one task to the next, all the while making precise measurements and notations and recording them in his notebooks. As a spectator, Lucien understood what decades of training had brought to the fore, and while he watched, there were moments when he could not help but be infected by his father’s optimism. Death seemed far away, as if it would be impossible for such an ordered, efficient rehearsal process to lead to anything but a successful performance. It was easy to imagine countless others around the world—whether scientists or architects or engineers or artists—undertaking the “unperformable,” making people stronger, transforming cities into taller, more formidable places, so that those who had walked the same streets even a generation earlier would not recognize the marvels they now beheld.
ONE MORNING IN early September, Guillaume extracted the new vaccine from a congealed mass of what to Lucien looked like a handful of dripping seaweed. He placed the liquid in a small covered flask, where it was scheduled to remain until sunset, which he had determined to be the best time for a living organism to ingest it. While his father spent the rest of the day cleaning and organizing the laboratory, Lucien stayed in the garden, trying to contain a mix of nerves and adrenaline not unlike what he used to feel before performing. What was perhaps most remarkable to him—except for the vaccine itself—was the extent to which his grief