Chapter Nine

Dr. James Nudelman tossed another double handful of chopped cabbage into the huge pot and watched the mush of overcooked green contents quickly return to a rolling boil. He wasn’t home sick as he’d told his colleagues; he was home experimenting. On the other side of the spacious, spot-lit, marble-counter-topped kitchen and across the sunken living room, floor-to-ceiling windows revealed a panorama of twinkling lights above the tops of Central Park’s dark trees. The greatest city in the world absolutely throbbed with power.

Polluting, expensive, nonrenewable power.

All that was about to change.

The world was about to change, thanks to him.

Over the course of two years, the physicist PhD had turned the pricey, five-room, eighteenth-floor apartment he’d inherited from Granny Nudelman into his own private laboratory, stripped off the wall-to-wall Berber carpeting, cleared all but one of the rooms of furniture and redecorated it after the style of a chemical plant. Chest-high rows of twelve-by-eight-by-eight black plastic boxes divided more than half the interior space. The battery terminals on the ends of the cases were linked by heavy electric cable; inside each was thousands of neat stacks of a specially laminated paper that had been presoaked in copper chloride. Suspended by heavy chain from the ceiling, at intervals above the rows were twenty-gallon translucent plastic tanks filled with a lemon-orange-tinted fluid. Spiderwebs of clear tubing containing this liquid ran from the bottoms of the tanks to the tops of the rows of boxes.

The whole system was drip fed. Tubing at the bottoms of the stacks was clustered and duct-taped in bundles to the floor, leading off to the bathroom. Gravity pressure forced the waste products of the chemical process straight into his spare-room’s toilet. With this prototype design and a DC-to-AC inverter, he had successfully powered a toaster, blender, fan and clock radio. And now, the thousand-watt benchmark: a burner on his electric stove.

If Granny Nudelman’s apartment smelled like a public urinal, there was good reason.

The impossible dream of a reusable, pee-powered battery had become a reality.

Standing in the rising, cabbage-reeking steam, staring out at the twinkling lights, he saw a brave new world. Urine would never again be flushed away. It would become a precious commodity, something to be saved, gathered, trucked to pollution-free power plants. He envisioned Manhattan’s 8.3 million sets of kidneys, 8.3 million bladders working in unison around the clock, seven days a week to produce enough clean energy to light the largest city in the United States.

Thomas Alva Edison might have given the world light, but James MacArthur Nudelman would supply it with endless, renewable power.

Yellow is the new green, he thought

Of course there were still a number of critical questions left to answer. Was the technology really scalable? What were the limits of the current system design? How far could the life span of laminated paper cells be extended? He had to wait until his contract with the university expired before taking his ground-breaking discovery to the next level, otherwise he would have to share the patents and royalties with the institution—something he had no intention of doing. Ensuing steps were going to require serious venture capital, but he was confident he would find it with very little difficulty.

Although secrecy was vital, he had been forced to involve select members of the hospital cleaning staff in his experiments. He had had no choice. By himself he couldn’t supply sufficient quantities of urine to fuel the electrochemical process. For many months he had been paying cash under the table for topped-off catheter bags. These were hush-hush transactions conducted in the facility’s parking garage. He lugged the bags home in an ice chest in the trunk of his car.

Behind his back he knew his black-market suppliers referred to him as “the pee-o-holic.”

Let them scoff, he told himself. In the future, every time someone stands or sits to relieve himself they will think of me and be eternally grateful. Instead of “taking a piss,” they will call it “taking a Nudelman.”

With the cabbage hard on the boil and banks of scented candles burning on every horizontal surface, he removed a can of spring-bouquet air freshener from an open case at his feet and sprayed liberally between living room and the entry foyer. The other people on his floor had been complaining bitterly that the hallway outside his apartment smelled like a zoo. The boiling cabbage, the vanilla candles and the aerosol helped to mask the odor of his clandestine operation.

Waving the container back and forth, like a beauty queen on a parade float, he retraced his steps. Halfway to the kitchen, from behind, there came a terrible crash. As he instinctively hunched at the sound, the solid wood front door of his apartment splintered from the hinges and triple dead-bolt locks, cartwheeled past him and landed on the steps of the sunken living room.

He jerked his head around, thumb frozen, still pressing the can’s spray button.

Huge figures in purple and black poured through the ruin of his entryway. The faces under the hoods looked dark and warty, eyes as yellow as the fluid in the suspended tanks.

The container in his hand hissed, sputtered, then ran out of propellant.

One of the intruders stepped from between the others. Across its arms, it carried a smaller individual who was dressed in the same style.

Nudelman backpedaled from this advancing apparition until his spine hit the edge of the marble countertop. In the U-shaped kitchen there was nowhere to run. The intruder held the small person cradled not three feet away. The face was mostly hidden by the hood’s overhang and the intense backlight of the ceiling spots. He stared dumbfounded at the bare foot that dangled before him.

The pale toes, arch and instep were flesh and blood and distinctly human, but the rest of the appendage was steel. A set of overlapping plates appeared to supply articulation at the ankle joint, with some kind of connected, through-and-through axle. Everywhere it abutted metal, the flesh looked angry and inflamed, and there was green pus.

In short, it was a prosthesis from hell.

“Dr. Nudelman,” a rasping voice said, “gather up whatever material you will need to continue your work. You are coming with me now.”

How many times in the dead of night had he replayed a variation on this dark fantasy? That the Chinese or Russians would break in and steal him and his discovery, that he’d be locked away in a concrete prison of a top-secret research center and never seen or heard from again. But they didn’t look Chinese or Russian. Nor a goon squad hired by one of the big oil and power octopi. Their strange, dark and bumpy skin, the cruel amber talons on their thumbs, the width of their bodies and the blocky shape of their heads—they all looked alike, and they didn’t look human.

The pack of huge bodies shifted slightly, and he saw they had already taken a human captive—a slender man dressed in a black limo-driver’s uniform, complete with shiny cap. One of the creatures at the rear had him by the back of neck and lifted up on tiptoe.

“Who are you?” Nudelman asked, trying desperately to stall for enough time to think through his options.

“I am your master,” the little person told him, “from now until you draw your last breath.” Then it reached up with a steel claw and tossed back the purple hood.

As Nudelman recoiled, he felt his bladder sphincter release, but there was no flood of hot wetness down the front of his pants.

The littlest monster had scared him pissless.