Hellboy: Unnatural Selection(36)

"Looks like a regular guy," Hellboy said.

"To start with, he was. Blake was a scientist and something of a magician. The scientist side people respected; his research into cell reconstruction was second to none, and he was one of the first to catalogue the genetic changes being caused in the natural world by humankind's pollution of the planet. A sort of roster of defects, which back then was pretty much doubted or ignored by many people. The magic ... well, that made people nervous. For such a serious scientist to dabble in arcane matters meant that he was effectively ostracized from the rest of the scientific community. It didn't stop his research, or his messing with magic, but it did mean that he lost several major grants from universities and government agencies. Blake went out on his own, and in 1969 he went underground."

"Disappeared?" Abe said.

"Vanished. Nobody knew where he was or what he was doing. And in many ways, nobody really cared. His wife and two boys went with him. There was no big hoo-ha, no fuss. A few people here and there wondered where he was and what he was doing, but he soon just faded away. Another nutty professor. Those few who cared thought he'd probably had enough of the mockery and ridicule and found himself a quiet place in South America to continue his research.

"But then something happened. In 1970 certain U.S. government agencies started trying to track him down — nothing official, all covert. I've collected files and letters over the years, all of them pointing to the fact that, suddenly, the government wanted him. There are few hints about why, but one of the main reasons seems to be something to do with what he left behind. Someone took an interest in his research, broke into his home, and found something there that scared them."

"Who broke in?" Hellboy asked.

"I don't know."

"What did they find?"

"Again, I don't know. But there seems to have been a tremendous amount of energy and resources expended in an effort to track down Blake and his family. They didn't find him."

"So that's it?" Hellboy said. "It's hardly conclusive."

"That's not all," Kate said. "The best is yet to come. Blake came back of his own accord, and he'd changed. He set up home in New York, but he never seemed to go back to work. Instead he launched a bitter series of verbal assaults on the world's governments' disregard of the environment. He warned of the end of the world being brought about through pollution and climate change. He predicted holes in the ozone layer, dead seas, and the air being denuded of oxygen because of deforestation. He was raving, expounding all sorts of apocalyptic theories that most people ignored or just laughed at. On the surface he became something of an object of ridicule." She tapped her finger on the table and stared down at Blake's image on her computer.

"On the surface?" Abe said. "What about underneath?"

"Beneath the surface certain people were very scared. Blake was scorned by his peers and vilified by governments, but he kept on ranting through every possible public forum. He went from delivering lectures on TV to standing on street corners, raging about the death we were bringing down on ourselves, claiming that humanity had already wiped out most of the wonder in the world and now was ready to destroy what was left. 'Slow suffocation' is the phrase he used. He claimed that we had destroyed all that was good in the world, and now we were suffocating."

"He wasn't far off on some points," Hellboy said. "The pollution stuff, at least."

"It wasn't something that governments wanted to hear."

"Still isn't now. Too much money involved in saving the planet. So what's all this building up to? What happened to Blake?"

"Official version first," said Kate. "He killed his wife and children, burned down his house, and went off somewhere to commit suicide." She opened another computer file and showed them all the image of the blackened house, the framework a charred skeleton.

"And the true version?"

"Conjecture on my part, but I'm pretty certain that his wife was killed in a state-sanctioned hit that went wrong."

"Oh crap." Hellboy leaned forward and looked closer at the ruins of the house. "Not very subtle."

"You said they killed his wife?" Abe said. "What about his children, and Blake himself?"

"Back underground," Kate said. "So far as I can tell, nothing has been heard or seen of them since. They've gone. Where, when, or why I was never able to find out."