13
Martin Onell was in his corner office and not busy, the Management Services Officer assured Alicia, ushering her in. Onell wore his usual three-piece suit, brown today, with a sunset yellow button-down shirt and muted red tie.
“Alicia! I’ve been hoping I would hear back from you about the Minority Mentorship Program.”
“Uh, I’m behind in—”
“The vice chancellor has been e-mailing me every day about getting you to show up for their meetings.” He got up and came around his large desk, careful not to knock over a pile of physics journals.
“Those meetings, they’re endless. I can’t stand them. That Gender Education director is so boring—”
“It’s an obligation we all share, though, I think you’ll agree.” He smiled warmly and crinkled his eyes, his let-us-reason-together mode. Best to cut this off before he got too sincere. “Of course, some more than others.”
Here came the packaged minilecture on her obligation to other “minorities,” especially since she embodied two for the price of one. (She sometimes suspected the administration would have been overjoyed if she had turned out to be a lesbian, thus making her a three-in-one recruiting bonanza.) She had to get this conversation off this well-worn track.
Deep breath, steely stare. “I’m here to ask why you set up a panel about my research and didn’t even tell me.”
The sincerity vanished and his face went blank. “I had to, of course.”
“Why ‘of course’?”
“The vice chancellor for research thought there might be, well, considerable liability for UCI. If you had in fact stolen valuable—”
“Stolen? I took—”
“—which was the way it was presented by Brookhaven, you must concede. Well, when I heard that, I decided that just asking a few of your colleagues from the particle physics faculty to render an informal opinion about how such disputes are handled was a good idea.”
“I don’t like you operating behind my back.”
He fingered his tie. “I have to protect the department.”
In the mid-1990s UCI had suffered through an interminable scandal when some women’s eggs had been mishandled in a medical school fertility clinic. Starting as a minor paperwork problem, in the hands of lawyers the whole mess had ballooned into a many-megabucks payout, often to people who had suffered no real injury beyond “psychological damage.” Since then, every administrator had tiptoed past anything that smelled of litigation. Alicia remembered all this as she watched Onell’s face turn from wary distance to solicitude. She had intended to give him a thorough working over, but somehow her heart was not in gear for more confrontation. “I… see,” she said lamely.
“I’m sure it will all work out,” he said.
She knew that once he retreated into platitudes she would get no more from him. His managerial style was defensive, usually operating behind an armor of documentation; nothing truly happened unless it got written down, or so any investigating body would find. A predictable mode, if rather tedious.
“I’ll be in touch, then,” she said, her minimal-trouble exit line. She left the chairman’s office only mildly irked, which in turn surprised her. Maybe, God help us, I’m getting used to this stuff.
The lab was dark when she finally got there. Dusk was settling and little light spilled across the concrete floor from the side doorway. Better not flip on the lights, though, she thought; probably Brad was taking more optical data.
By feel she found her way along a line of cabinets. “Brad?” No answer. Maybe he had gone out for something, leaving the diagnostics running. She could make out tiny red running lights on the computer monitors, like distant red stars.
The undergraduates would have knocked off their assembly work on the Core Element an hour before, she knew. Her left foot kicked some metal part lying in the way. It clattered loudly in the strange silence. She was used to some bustle and movement here and the hush was odd in the big bay space. Further along the cabinets she felt for a tool rack mounted on the wall. She was a bug about putting tools back and was rewarded when her hand closed on one of their narrow-beam flashlights. She went toward the red monitor lights, but Brad was not in the ‘scope room. She listened for his stirring. Maybe he was inside the light blanket, which was closed. Probably he was making some fine adjustments or measuring the diameter again.
“Brad?” No answer. But then, he had a total concentration and often didn’t respond when he was intent on a task. She liked such absorption; the best experimenters often had it. Carefully she moved through the gloom.
She had allowed herself to start puzzling over the diameter on the walk back over. The damned thing changed, as if it were alive. Certainly the mystery kept deepening, deepening wonderfully. There really was something going on here—something big—and she felt it intuitively in her bones. But what? She was still trying to decide whether she thought Max’s wormhole idea made any sense. The tidal effect measurement gave him credibility.
The flashlight’s watery light cast moving shadows amid the racks of gear; they would have to straighten up in here or else they’d be tripping over themselves.
She drew back a flap on the light blanket and stepped into the narrow enclosure. Her flashlight beam showed the clusters of light pipes tied in bunches along the top of the makeshift steel rod framework. The area had gotten jammed with more and more diagnostic leads, cables snaking everywhere.
There was a curious singed smell that made her wrinkle her nose. Ozone? No, different.
Some of the wiring looked out of place. In the flashlight’s pale tunnel of light the sphere reflected her beam back at her. The smell was strong, cutting, as though some electronics component had fried itself. She felt alarm. What had happened? Where was Brad?
She stepped forward and her right foot struck something soft. She nearly lost her balance, shot out a hand to a steel brace to steady herself, and looked down. What equipment was supposed to be here—?
A black mask stared up at her. She gasped. Eyelids burned away so that the too-white eyes gazed at the ceiling.
She staggered, her breath coming in quick pants. The top half of the body was a charred mass, clothes plastered into a dark layer. She recognized the faded blue jeans and big Western belt. Brad. Or rather, what had been Brad.
His right hand clutched an electrical probe. The face was a swollen, scorched blob, as if it had been licked by a flamethrower. The cheeks puffed out like fleshy balloons. Lips like burst sausages.
She had to make herself breathe in, but the air seemed suddenly thick and putrid with oily, dense fumes. The dark gathered around her head and she felt woozy, teetering, and when her flashlight beam tilted crazily up, it caught the sphere’s gleam again, a sharp hard reflected glare once more, like the fixed stare of an angry eye.
PART III
IMPOSSIBLE THINGS
Treiman’s Theorem: Impossible things usually don’t happen.
—Sam Treiman, Princeton University physicist
1
The hospital was imposing, crisp and bright in its metallic sheen. She had come from the damp night outside into frosty brilliance and enameled warrens. The effect was surrealistic, jarring, quite in keeping with her own inner dislocations.
The waiting room was designed to soften tensions, she noted abstractly. Modern paintings highlighted by concealed spotlights made big subdued, calming blotches on the dusty rose walls. A big leather armchair dominated a cozy arrangement of two couches and a cheery flower arrangement, which proved to be artificial. Indirect lighting, satin-finished birch, lots of muted fabrics. None of this worked for her; she fidgeted and paced.
A physician came and asked if she were a relative. From the block branch of his family tree? she thought, then realized this was a purely formal question. “No, his thesis professor. How is he doing?”
The doctor said carefully, “Not good. He is in a coma and we are trying to reduce the serious swelling in his braincase.”
She
studied his face as if looking for answers. “His vitals…?”
He showed her a clipboard holding a sheet covered in dot matrix type, a diagnostic printout. “No skull fractures. Proteins abnormal from the cerebral hemorrhage. The CAT scan shows massive swelling. Then, of course, the burns.”
She remembered the chilling sight of the team lifting Brad. A clean line down his neck divided his blasted face from white skin. The front half of his hair was scorched away, the back still combed. “I don’t understand, the way he looked…”
“If he lives, he will need extensive facial reconstruction.”
She nodded vigorously. “They’ve been doing so much with that.” Empty, automatic optimism. “Why… why is he in a coma?”
“Not concussion. The head sustained some substantial heating throughout, I believe. His burns are not superficial.”
She was grateful for something more than smooth, meaningless phrases. Better, the man had not reverted to the hedged-in, minimize-possible-damage style. And the first of all the commandments shall be: Cover Thy Ass.
“Will he… make it?”
“I honestly cannot tell.”
That was all there was to say. She spent the next hour pacing. University figures arrived, but they scarcely registered through her haze. When Martin Onell appeared, she answered his questions just as she had those of various police. “How did it happen?” Onell asked, but she had no answers. The sphere, of course, but how?
She found herself responding to Onell’s questions with the soothing sentences that women were supposed to be better at than men. But she could not seem to get anything to come out right, to make her sentences hang together.
Onell had the proper team sent to secure the lab scene. People came and went, faces sliding by behind glass. A Detective Sturges, homicide, was persistent. “This was an accident,” she said and he nodded, said nothing.
Brad’s parents could not be reached. She called Max and somehow got out the essentials. Her throat was tight and she could not think of what to say. Max said he would drive down from Pasadena. More people, questions, the stale cool air stretched thin and tight around her. Brad, Brad…
Then the physician came in again and told them that Brad was dead. Just like that, no warning, and she was sitting in the big leather armchair with talk going by her and nothing registering. Onell said things and people came and went, but she could not get a grip on the sliding events at all, at all.
She was standing in the same waiting room with her arms around Max in a sympathetic hug. He had just arrived.
“Professor Butterworth?”
It was Detective Sturges, eyes slightly averted, seeming a little embarrassed to approach them. She and Max let their arms drop and she caught a closing in Sturges’s face. He had seen a lot of mayhem in his line of work, but maybe not much affection. Or was it the mixed races?
“Yes?” She put on her best business voice.
“I’ve got some preliminary results here from the coroner. Wondered if you could add anything further.” Sturges held out a clipboard. “These three-sheets are a mess to read—”
“Three-sheets?” she asked.
“The third carbon copy of the arriving officers’ reports and the technical team reports. Like reading chicken scratches. Anyway, the radiological and CAT scan data show cause of death was cerebral swelling. It looks like his head just got cooked.”
Alicia winced at the detective’s words, opened her mouth, could say nothing.
“What about the rest?” Max asked sharply, stepping forward a bit, between her and Sturges.
Sturges paused just long enough for Alicia to see him resolve to not get irked, a professional reflex. She introduced Max and Sturges said, “The drug screen shows nothing, if that’s what you mean.”
“What went wrong in the lab?” Max asked.
Sturges glanced at her and said carefully, “I don’t have to conclude anything just yet, but Professor Butterworth, you said something earlier about an object you were studying?”
She could not shake off her numb, stark disbelief. “A high-energy physics experiment.”
“Well, accidents we still have to look into. I’ll visit the lab and hand off on it as soon as I get the final coroner’s.”
Then he just went away. Alicia felt a wave of relief, as if the matter-of-fact detective had been her judge. But he had not banished the guilt she carried like a leaden weight in the pit of her stomach, an almost physical pain.
In the car back to UCI she abruptly said, “Times like this, I wish I was religious.”
“Oh?” Max glanced at her, his tone cautious.
Did she seem obviously shaky? She tried to relax, found that her hands were clenched white. Keep talking, that might help. “I’d… I’d sure like to believe that Brad is off somewhere else, not just a bunch of fried neurons.”
He nodded. “It would be better…”
She made herself keep going. “I was a teenage atheist. A big change from the good Baptist girl of twelve.”
“Church was just going through the motions for me. Lutheran.”
“I was quite proud of myself, liberated from dogma and all.”
He chuckled. “Me too. If it’s any consolation, your opinion doesn’t change anything. Heaven and God exist, or don’t, no matter what you think.”
“Yeah, and even that doesn’t make me feel any better. When I’m at my grandparents and they drag me to a service, it’s beautiful and nostalgic, like pictures in your high school annual. You know that hollow feeling? Like there’s a young woman back there, sweetly naive, and that’s the only way I can visit her now.”
He smiled wanly. “She’s still there. I can see her peeking out sometimes.”
This took her off-balance. He looked at her almost shyly, as if to gauge her reaction. She said hesitantly, “There was more to her than what I am now, just getting nostalgic for her early faith.”
“Don’t beat yourself up about it.”
“You too, Max.”
He shot her a glance, said nothing, so she plunged on. “You were in the right ballpark with that wormhole idea, but it didn’t give us anything to anticipate this.”
He sighed. “Yeah.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Ummm.” It was a grudging, hedgehog sound.
“It’s pointless. I was in charge of the lab, not you.”
“Ummmm.” He reached over and patted her hand.
Irvine’s neon consumer gumbo slid by beyond Max’s dirty window. Relentlessly cheery colors brimmed beneath a sky of stars. The world seemed inky and impenetrable, dark with something more than night.
2
“Now we have to run the gauntlet,” she said dourly, slamming the door of Max’s car too hard.
“You’re sure it was the sphere?” Max asked, voice guarded in the thick fog.
“Must be.” They walked through shadows toward the lab building. The big bay doors yawned and glaring blue-white light speared out through the misty gloom.
“How could it be? The sphere was giving off very weak UV.”
“It was getting larger, though.”
“Oh? When did you discover that?”
She glanced at her watch. “Four hours ago.” How could it be so little?
“Grew how much?”
“Half a centimeter in diameter.”
“Um. That couldn’t make much diff—”
“How do we know?” She rounded on him suddenly as they reached the polished concrete of the dock. “How?”
“Well, sure we don’t, but there wasn’t much coming in…”
She blinked rapidly. “I’m… sorry.”
“You weren’t responsible. When you’re studying something completely new—”
“You take precautions.”
“Against what? You don’t know, that’s the point.”
“At least you warn people.”
“Again, you don’t know what to warn them against.”
She sighed and sag
ged against the steel frame of the bay doors. “You’re going to keep on being the voice of sweet reason, aren’t you?”
“My job.” He looked into her eyes, his own lined with worry. “They’re going to ask some nasty questions in there. Feel up to it?”
“I hope so.”
“Maybe you should go home, leave it for tomorrow.”
“I won’t sleep anyway. I’d rather get through this.”
“Us. We get through it.”
“You’re not involved.”
“The hell I’m not. I can’t let you walk in there and get shredded.”
She studied his face. His eyes seemed large and luminous, peering into her confusion. “You can stay clear of this.”
His lips compressed into a thin line. “No way.”
“Sure?”
“Sure.”
“You can’t just Gary Cooper your way through this next part, y’know.”
He smiled. “You’ve sure got a smart mouth on you.”
“Not that it’s done me a whole lot of good.”
He peered deeply into her eyes. “It’s a cover, of course.”
“For?” She was flustered and automatically came back with a question.
“I wonder.”
She opened her mouth, closed it, her mind awhirl.
He stepped back as if to give her room and his face reverted to his crisp, sharp-eyed expression. “Sorry, I shouldn’t do things like that.”
“Well, I… I…”
“One thing at a time. For now, just give them the facts. We don’t have to speculate out loud.”
“I wouldn’t know how to.”
“I wouldn’t either. I just know not to try.”
They were all there: safety personnel summoned from their dinners, police, Detective Sturges, Executive Vice Chancellor for Research Lattimer, Chairman Onell. They all milled around as both UCI and Sturges’s team took photographs. Nobody seemed worried about the sphere as a threat; it looked as before, a shiny ball. Not much obvious menace there.
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