“We’re at your mercy,” she went on. “Both of us. But what you said the first time we met—about knowing what it’s like to work, knowing the entire world might be laughing at you—makes me think you’ll understand why I had to do what I did. You’re an outsider—just as we are. You’re not a cop. If you turn us in…well, I’m not going to try to stop you. But it’s my hope you won’t do that; that you won’t judge us; that you’ll understand. If you expose him to the world…it will be his death sentence. He’ll try to commit suicide again—and this time, he’ll succeed.”
Logan opened his mouth to speak, then shut it again. He realized he was facing a terrible quandary. Technically, Laura Feverbridge had done something illegal, or at the very least unethical—she had deliberately misidentified a body. On the other hand, it had been done with the best of intentions. The dead man had died accidentally, a lonely drifter with no family or social ties. The ashes had long since been scattered. He thought of the elderly Dr. Feverbridge, sitting inside the secret lab hidden deep in these woods. Even given the few words they’d exchanged, he’d felt an intellectual power, a charismatic conviction in his own beliefs, radiate from the man. He also sensed an alienness, a strangeness—exactly the kind of thing that would frighten men of smaller intellect: academics who’d be quick to dismiss his work. As Laura Feverbridge had reminded him, he himself was all too aware what it felt like to have one’s work derided. He admired her loyalty—and he could sense the intense effort she had gone through, was going through, to help and protect her father. He’d been aware of something, that first time they’d met—something going on inside her that was beyond the ordinary. Now he knew what it was.
He also knew what Jessup would want him to do. But he asked himself: What crime had been committed here, really? And who had been hurt? Nobody. On the other hand, if he were to reveal the truth, the old man would quite likely take his own life…leaving his daughter alone and his work incomplete.
Laura Feverbridge was looking at him intently. He glanced from her face to the shotgun in her hands, and back into her eyes again. This was a dilemma he simply did not know how to resolve.
“Let’s go back inside,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment. Then she nodded and silently led the way across the clearing and into the lab.
20
As they stepped inside, Dr. Feverbridge—who was still sitting at the lab table—raised his head, looking at Logan with a mild yet proud gaze.
“I suppose my daughter told you all about me,” he said. “The troubled genius, the self-destructive scientist.”
Logan nodded silently as Laura Feverbridge placed the shotgun in a corner.
“I’m not proud that I tried to take my own life, Dr. Logan. But I simply couldn’t stand it any longer—the personal anger, the despair.” He paused. “I suppose I should consider myself the luckiest father in the world: to have a daughter willing to sacrifice so much for my sake. These past six months, I’ve been like a free man. You see, it doesn’t matter to me whether my work is published posthumously, so to speak—it only matters that I get the chance to finish it, free from the constant, the maddening, torrent of hecklers and naysayers. Except it seems we’ve been careless of late. I suppose we’ve allowed our voices to be overheard, our lights to be seen.”
“No doubt.” Laura shook her head bitterly, then glanced at Logan. “And I suppose we have Kevin to thank for your return.”
They had been keeping their voices pitched low, precisely so that—Logan realized—this same Kevin would not overhear them.
“The fact is, my work is extremely important. And I’m close to finishing it—so close.” Feverbridge looked at Logan more intently. “I can sense you’re conflicted. You don’t know whether to alert the authorities about all this. Perhaps if I showed you the full nature of my work, showed you what we’ve truly accomplished, it would help you decide.”
Laura looked at him sharply. “Father? Are you sure—?”
“What choice do we have? Besides, your Dr. Logan here might find our accomplishments enlightening.” He looked back at Logan. “Let me pose a question to you. What do you suppose our early ancestors—the East African hominids—felt when they looked up at a full moon?”
Logan thought for a moment. “Fear.”
“Precisely. To the average humanoid biped of two hundred thousand years ago, the full moon meant open season—and they were the game. For a predator like a saber-toothed tiger, the full moon would be like a spotlight shining on their prey. When people think of the ‘lunar effect,’ if they think of it at all, it’s as a bunch of malarkey, an urban legend easily laughed away: surgeries going wrong, birthrates increasing, spikes in violent behavior, schizophrenics running amok. National Enquirer stuff.” Feverbridge scoffed. “But the more I thought about it and studied it, the more I realized that the moon, especially the full moon, has in fact always exerted a truly unexplainable influence on earthly life, especially for diurnal animals. At first it presented as fear, as you just said yourself. Later, it was thought to cause madness, even lycanthropy.” Here he gave a dismissive wave of a hand. “More recently, that has fallen aside—and today’s science, as it does so often when it comes face-to-face with old beliefs and behaviors not easily understood by modern man, has turned its back. But the influence was there, nonetheless. And I became determined to understand what caused it.”
He stood up and began to pace the room. “I read every paper, examined every account of the moon’s influence. I attacked the problem from every angle: psychological, physiological, evolutionary. And though I could demonstrate that the full moon had, historically, an unusual influence, I could not discover the reason. Until I stumbled upon the Apollo moon landings.”
This was so unexpected that Logan frowned. “I’m sorry?”
Feverbridge chuckled at Logan’s discomfiture. “That’s right. You know, of course, that when Apollo Eleven returned from the moon, it brought back many pounds of moon rocks, carefully packed in a metal box and sealed in such a way as to maintain the moon’s low-pressure conditions. But when the astronauts landed back on earth, the seals on the box were gone. Ruined.” He returned to the lab table, leaned in close to Logan. “And that’s not all. Six times, Apollo missions returned with moon rocks in sealed containers. And six times, no matter what they tried, those seals on the containers were destroyed by the time they got back to earth.” He paused. “Care to speculate why?”
Logan shook his head. “I can’t even begin to speculate.”
Feverbridge laughed again. “Dust.”
“Excuse me?”
“Dust! Moon dust. You see, there’s no wind on the moon. There’s no water, there’s no erosion—it’s not like earth, where rocks and pebbles become smooth and rounded through abrasion. On the moon, dust is fine, but incredibly sharp, like a knife. It’s essentially tiny, powdered glass. And it doesn’t just cover the surface—it also floats like clouds, fifty miles or more above the surface, in the moon’s exosphere. It rises up in streams—nobody knows exactly why, but some speculate that it’s the ‘fountain model’: radiation from the sun knocking electrons from the atoms in the lunar dust, giving it a positive charge and causing it to rise on the solar wind. In 2013, NASA even sent a satellite—the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE—to study this ‘dust atmosphere.’ It was intentionally crashed into the dark side of the moon six months later. As far as I know, the data is still being analyzed.”
He pushed himself away from the table, began pacing again. “Ask yourself: what is moonlight? It’s merely the sun’s visible radiation, reflecting off the moon—but being filtered through this strange cloud of moon dust. When I analyzed it further, I discovered that, under the proper conditions, this dust changes the quality of the light: in distribution of wavelength and polarization—circular polarization, in fact. Those conditions include such violent activity as solar flares and the like. But I began to speculate further: Was it possible this unusual qu
ality of light, when viewed by diurnal creatures on earth, could affect the brain sufficiently to cause changes in behavior? And could the full moon alone be enough to achieve that?”
Feverbridge walked to a large table set against the far wall, then motioned Logan toward him. “That was the beginnings of a working hypothesis: that the effect of this special, polarized moonlight, entering the brain, could cause an unusual response: fear, excitability, aggression. But, like any good scientist, I had to test this hypothesis. And that meant re-creating, not only moonlight, but moonlight filtered through the equivalent of moon dust, all within a laboratory environment. And that proved to be a very difficult and time-consuming process—at the time, hampered by my own mood of bitterness and defeat.”
He paused a moment, looking carefully at Logan to see what impression his words were having. “But then, in secret, I moved to this lab. And work began in earnest, with new hope and enthusiasm. I started with moonlight itself. As you may know, all visible light has what’s known as a color temperature, expressed in kelvins. Color temperatures over five thousand kelvins are known as ‘cool’ colors. The sun, which is similar to a standard black-body radiator, emits light that penetrates our atmosphere at close to six thousand kelvins. The moon, a ‘warmer’ color, has a light temperature of around four thousand. The flame of a candle, for comparison, is closer to eighteen hundred kelvins.”
He wheeled over the tall metal dolly holding the barrel-shaped lamp Logan had noticed when he’d first entered the building. “This luminaire is what’s technically known as an HMI Fresnel light. The unique texturing of the Fresnel lens allows for an even light that ‘softens,’ or darkens, at the edges: much like our own perception of moonlight. HMI, or hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide—how’s that for a mouthful!—produces light by means of an arc lamp instead of an incandescent bulb. They are extremely high-quality light sources—and extremely expensive. This one is particularly nice.” He patted the light, which was half the size of an oil drum. It swung gently on its mount. “Goes for a cool twenty thousand dollars. It has an eighteen-K bulb that can throw a twelve-foot spot of fifteen hundred foot-candles almost seventy feet. Of course, I haven’t used it at full strength—not for my current studies, at least. But suffice it to say rigorous analysis made it clear that this particular luminaire, at the proper setting, most closely approximates the way moonlight strikes the earth.”
He walked over to a nearby shelf, pulled out a large plastic container, and placed it on the worktable. “Once I had achieved the proper temperature for moonlight, I had to simulate the effect of how the sun’s photons would react when they pass through the moon’s ‘dust atmosphere,’ bounce off the surface, and pass through the dust a second time on their way to the earth. This meant, first, researching the specific chemical nature of moon dust—which has been well documented by NASA—and then applying the precise filters to re-create it.”
Swinging back the barn doors on the Fresnel, he opened the plastic container, removed a thin circular plate of pale glass, and fitted it to the front of the lens. He did this a second time, and then a third time, adding additional filters. Then he turned back to Logan. “This re-creates moonlight, as filtered through the dust atmosphere of the moon, as it would have been seen all over the earth five hundred years ago.”
“Why five hundred years?” Logan asked.
“Because our atmosphere, Dr. Logan, has—over the last few centuries—become saturated with the burn-off of fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, what have you.”
“In other words, the effect you hypothesize would have been much stronger in the past than it is today.”
“Exactly: hence the many more eyewitness accounts of strange or unexplained behavior in early documents concerning the full moon. Now, please observe. I’m going to reproduce the effect of that same full moon.” Walking over to the far wall, he picked up one of the animal cages, brought it over, and placed it on the table. “Northern short-tailed shrews,” he explained. Then, reaching under the worktable, he pulled out a pair of heavy rubber gloves and put them on. “They’re venomous,” he went on, “but perfect mammals for our study.” He opened the cage, reached inside, and pulled out first one, then another, of the guinea-pig-sized creatures, covered with soft gray fur. They sat on the table, sleepy and docile, evidently newly awakened.
“Now, watch carefully,” Feverbridge said as he pulled the light stand back from the table and stood directly behind it.
“Don’t look at the light,” Laura Feverbridge warned, speaking for the first time since her father had begun his explanation. “Just the shrews.”
She walked over to the wall and snapped off the overhead. Immediately, the room was plunged into darkness. A moment later, there was another snap, and the Fresnel came on, its spotlight aimed at the creatures on the worktable. The light, Logan noticed, was low, and of a pale, almost ghostly yellow—exactly like moonlight.
At first, nothing happened. Then the creatures began to show signs of restlessness. Within moments, this had turned to irritability. They began squabbling, emitting low squeaks and circling each other warily. Abruptly, one lunged at the other, which batted back with both sets of foreclaws.
Very quickly, Dr. Feverbridge turned off the Fresnel. At the same time, Laura snapped the overhead light back on. Immediately, the creatures returned to their docile state.
“Well?” Feverbridge said as he returned the creatures to their cage, then replaced it on the shelf.
“I—” Logan did not quite know what to say. It was all so unusual, so different from what he’d expected. Dr. Feverbridge and his daughter, he realized, were right: this was groundbreaking research—perhaps even revolutionary.
“You can reproduce this behavior at will?” he asked.
“On almost all occasions, yes. So far, we’ve only employed a variety of small mammals for our tests. I could repeat the procedure on a different species, if you wish—white mice, hooded rats, voles—but the result would be the same: marked deviation from normal behavior patterns.”
“Why does this particular light affect the brain so strongly?” Logan asked.
“Remember the question I asked about early hominids? My belief is that it is an evolutionary development that’s taken place over hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of years. Diurnal animals sleep at night to hide from predators, and the danger would be highest on the night of the full moon. It’s become hardwired into us. Subconsciously, the special quality of this light raises hormonal levels to a fever pitch. Adrenaline is dumped into the bloodstream; flight-or-fight behavior is triggered. Some creatures may flee. Others—like these shrews—become uncharacteristically aggressive…very aggressive. My own analysis shows that over the millennia, as our natural predators have died off, the aggressive behavior has become the norm.”
“And if our atmosphere was to clear of smog and particulate matter? Would these deviant behaviors return when the moon is full—return to human beings, I mean?”
“Yes. Yes, I believe they would—depending, I suppose, on the person’s physical and emotional makeup.”
Logan tried to organize his thoughts; tried to process what he had just observed. “Kevin Pace, and the late Mr. Artowsky,” he said. “Do they know about this?”
“Only indirectly. They are acting—were acting, in the case of poor Mark—as controls, studying the same creatures we are studying, but under normal atmospheric and environmental conditions.”
Feverbridge turned away for a moment. When he turned back, the lighthearted, didactic mood was gone and anguish was suddenly in his eyes. “Do you understand the problem now, Dr. Logan? My theories have already been ridiculed to a degree that I can no longer live with. What would they say if I released additional findings? I can see the taunting headlines now: ‘Scientist claims space dust causes madness.’ I couldn’t bear that.” The anguish on his face spiked. “I wouldn’t.”
“That’s why we need to be as thorough as possible in completing the research,” Laura Feve
rbridge said. She spoke in a calm, soothing voice. “Document everything. Continue as we have been, carefully, comprehensively. Amass sufficient evidence to pass any peer review they could throw at us. We’re close now, Father. All we need is time. That is…if Dr. Logan will give it to us.”
And with this, she fell silent. Both of them—father and daughter—looked at Logan.
Logan took a deep breath. This was clearly cutting-edge research. If it was halted prematurely, the world would be the poorer for it. And the world would also surely lose a brilliant scientist.
“Just give us a little time,” Laura said, almost pleadingly. Coming forward, she gripped his sleeve again. “Time to finish our work. Then you can do whatever your conscience tells you.”
Logan glanced from one to the other. He now realized something that had not occurred to him before: it was quite possible that the nature of this work could shed some light on the murders Jessup was trying so desperately to solve.
“I won’t speak of this to anyone,” he said in a low voice. “At least, not until the work is complete. It may help identify what’s been going on out there in the woods. Meanwhile, if there’s a way I can help you, I will.”
For a long moment, the building was silent. Then Chase Feverbridge smiled faintly, nodded. Laura released her hold on his sleeve and took his hand in both of hers.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you—for both of us.”
21
In the days that followed, what he’d seen—and learned—at the secret laboratory in the woods behind the fire station left Logan in a state of moral uncertainty. There was no doubt that the elder Dr. Feverbridge’s work was important. On the other hand, the manner in which he’d become, essentially, a walking dead man—although Logan fully understood the reasons for it—felt unsavory at best. However, the bottom line was that he simply could not, for the present, tell Jessup or anyone else about the circumstances. Not only would that put an end to the man’s research—it would, almost certainly, put an end to his life.