by David Walton
She brightened a little. “Yeah. That and Nick likes to play the slots in Atlantic City.”
“Well, come on,” I said. “Don’t you have any pictures to show off? What does this quantum baby look like?”
We reached Brian’s office and stepped inside. Jean pursed her lips. “I don’t want to be rude,” she said, “but I’m going to have to run and leave you to it. I have a panel review meeting in about an hour, and I’m not quite ready for it.”
“Sure,” I said. “Good luck.”
She gave us a tired smile. “Thanks. Good luck yourself. You’ll need it to find anything in here.”
I looked around the office. The desk surfaces were cluttered with papers, sandwich wrappers, empty soda cans, and office supplies, with half a dozen smartpads scattered amidst the debris. There wasn’t much else. His office was sparsely decorated: a few diplomas, badly mounted and hanging askew, but no artwork, no photographs, and none of the squirrely knickknacks that covered most people’s desks. The smartpads might contain something interesting about his research, but they were likely to be encrypted.
“Has he said anything to you about what he’s been working on lately?” I asked.
Jean shook her head. “You know how Brian is about people stealing his ideas. Lately, he’s been even worse.”
“Secretive?”
“Ridiculously so. People have been making complaints. That’s just not how science is done anymore, with one maverick genius locking himself in a room and coming out twenty years later with a breakthrough. There’s process, teamwork, accountability. Anyway, good luck.”
She stepped out, closing the door. The motion revealed Brian’s leather jacket hanging from a hook. I thought of what he’d been wearing when he showed up at my house and picked up the jacket. I felt around, and in one of the pockets I found an envelope. The words “Jacob Kelley” were penned on it in Brian’s handwriting.
I tore it open and pulled out a single sheet of folded smartpaper. The only words were a single line of printed text: “What is your favorite number?”
Marek looked over my shoulder. “What’s that, some kind of password request?”
I smiled. “Something like that. You have a pen?”
Marek fished a Bic pen out of his pocket, and I wrote “137.036” on the paper. When I stopped, the printing disappeared and was replaced by a longer message:
Dear Jacob:
I wanted to come and tell you about all this in person, but I didn’t have the nerve. I think it’s for the best this way. You’re smart; you’ll figure it out, and maybe someday you’ll join me.
Say goodbye to Cathie for me.
Brian
I showed the letter to Marek.
“I thought he did come see you in person,” Marek said.
“Yeah. I don’t know what he means. Maybe he changed his mind after he wrote this.” I replaced the jacket on the hook on the back of the door, and a small mirror to one side caught my eye. Something about the light reflected from it seemed wrong. Marek moved in front of it, and his reflection flitted across the mirror in the opposite direction of his movement. Definitely odd. I stepped in front of it, so I could see my own reflection, and saw right away that my hair was parted on the wrong side. It was like looking at a photograph of myself instead of a reflection. I raised my hand, and the wrong hand went up. This wasn’t really a mirror.
“What’s going on with this?” I asked. I reached out to lift it off the wall. My reversed reflection in the mirror did the same, though with the wrong hand. I looked in my face, only there was something wrong, so horribly wrong that for a split second I couldn’t figure out what it was. My eyes were missing. In their place, there was only a smooth expanse of skin, unbroken, with not even a cavity where the eyes should have been.
It was like when a child in a crowded room reaches up and grasps, with easy familiarity, her father’s hand, only to discover that it is not her father after all but a complete stranger. A moment of calm reassurance is transformed into a moment of horror as she realizes that, not only is she holding the hand of a man she doesn’t know, but she has no idea where her father is.
I jerked away from the mirror, letting it fall back against the wall, and touched my eyes. The reflection in the mirror was normal again, too. “Did you see that?” I asked.
Marek peered in the mirror, then back at me. “See what?”
“Come on,” I said. “Time to go.”
“Where are we going?”
“To say goodbye to Cathie, like the letter says.”
“Who’s Cathie? Someone who works here?”
“Cathie’s not a who,” I said. “She’s a what.”
Underneath the Feynman Center were several levels of subbasement and the main access to the collider ring. The badges Jean had given us granted access to the elevator that descended into the collider tunnel itself. The tunnel was a huge concrete borehole similar in size to a highway tunnel—the same kind of earth-borer machines had been used to dig it out—except that this one was thirty miles long and ran in an ellipse. A large portion of the space was taken up by the particle ring itself—in which the subatomic particles orbited—and the huge electromagnets that straddled it, along with their entourage of other coolant pipes and snaking electrical cables.
There was a pedestrian path, about fifteen feet wide. Scientists who had to get from place to place along the ring usually rode bicycles, but there were a few golf carts used for VIP tours or maintenance runs. The whole thirty-mile track had to be checked regularly for cracking concrete, for rats or other animals that might chew on the cables, for signs of shifts in the bedrock that might cause problems, or any other potential problems with the machinery. We took one of the golf carts and headed out.
CATHIE was the Controlled Acceleration and Temperature Heavy Ion Experiment, a brainchild of Brian’s and mine when I was still working at the NJSC, but one that had never been fully funded. We had pushed it far enough that an underground bunker along the path of the collider ring had been dug to house it, but the project had been scuttled in favor of an experiment controlled by another colleague who was poor at experimentation but gifted at playing the game of politics. It had been the beginning of the end for me, to see our financing and most of our equipment taken away. The bunker had remained a concrete shell, emptied of its scientific apparatus, but Brian’s letter suggested there was something there he had wanted me to see.
Fifteen minutes later, we reached it and parked the golf cart. The door into the bunker was closed and had a warning sign indicating it was not in use, but I tried the handle and the door opened. There was a bad smell, but it wasn’t strong, and the implications didn’t dawn on me at first. Inside, we saw half a dozen card tables stacked with scientific equipment and strewn with paper cups and food wrappers. Black and blue cables snaked across the floor and tangled around the table legs. Instead of overhead fluorescents, the room was lit by a half-dozen yard-sale lamps. Was this an approved project? It didn’t look like it. There were thousands of dollars’ worth of instruments here, though; I had no idea how Brian could have purchased or stolen this much. He must have used the maintenance elevator access from the pine forest above to get it all down here secretly.
This was not the CATHIE experiment. As collider experiments go, CATHIE was a small one, but it would still have involved dozens of collaborating scientists and months of installation of a set of barrel-shaped detectors around a section of the ring. In fact, none of the instruments here was connected to the accelerator at all that I could see, except that Brian had tapped into the ring’s power lines. He had been using this underground bunker, not for its proximity to the accelerator, but because of its secrecy. What he was studying was something else entirely.
It wasn’t until I walked around one of the card tables that I saw him. He was lying on the concrete floor in a dark puddle, one leg crumpled under him at an odd angle, his chest a bloody ruin. It was Brian Vanderhall.
CHAPTER 8
&nbs
p; DOWN-SPIN
Judge Roswell called a short recess, after which Haviland continued his questioning of Officer Brittany Lin. Lin gazed straight at him with a confident expression as she answered, only occasionally looking to the jury when clarifying a word or technical term. She was a well-rehearsed and experienced witness.
“In the course of your investigation of the underground bunker, did you check for fingerprints?” Haviland asked.
“Yes, I did.”
“Can you share with us your findings?”
“Yes. Aside from those fingerprints that matched the victim, there were fingerprints found on a pair of microscopes and on a length of steel pipe. One of the microscopes had been badly damaged, possibly by being struck with the pipe.”
“And were these fingerprints matched to a person?”
“Yes. They were Jacob Kelley’s.”
“Could the fingerprints have been left from some previous visit that Mr. Kelley made to the bunker, sometime before the murder?”
“Yes, theoretically they could have, but given their clarity, it is unlikely they were there for many days. Also, the fingerprint evidence is consistent with other indicators we have that Kelley was at the scene at the time the murder took place.”
“What evidence is that?”
“A pair of size twelve New Balance athletic shoes left footprints in the victim’s blood. Bloody tracks from those shoes were found in a clear path leaving the bunker, then traveling up the stairs of a maintenance exit leading to the forest.”
“And were these shoes identified?” Haviland asked.
“Yes. Jacob Kelley was still wearing them several hours later, when he was apprehended by police.”
Haviland shuffled his notes to let this revelation sink in before continuing. “One more question, Officer. Did you examine the door that led to this secret underground bunker?”
“Yes, sir,” Lin said.
“Can you tell us your findings?”
“The door had been fitted with a fingerprint recognition lock.”
“Could you explain to the jury what a fingerprint recognition lock is meant to do?”
Lin faced the jury and shrugged in a way that communicated that of course they all knew what it was already. “It’s meant to permit entry only to certain, designated people, based on their fingerprints.”
“Just entry? Does that mean anyone could lock it?”
“No, I’m sorry. The lock is an electromagnetic bolt that can only be activated or deactivated by the designated person. To be locked, the door must be closed, and the lock can only be engaged by a person whose fingerprints are recognized.”
“It can’t be locked by an approved person when the door is opened, and then closed by someone else?”
“No. The mechanism can only be activated when the door is closed.”
“So the person who locked and closed the door must have been one of the people whose fingerprints were programmed into the locking mechanism.”
“Correct.”
“Had the lock been reprogrammed since Mr. Vanderhall’s death?”
“No. The internal computer logs clearly showed the lock programming had not been changed in years.”
“How many people was this lock programmed to allow to enter the room or lock it?”
“Two.”
“Who was the first?”
“The deceased, Mr. Brian Vanderhall.”
“And the second?”
She nodded toward me. “The accused, Mr. Jacob Kelley.”
CHAPTER 9
UP-SPIN
He was dead. Brian was dead. I felt for a pulse, though there could hardly be any doubt. His skin was cold. There was a lot of blood on the floor. I realized it was on my shoes and backed hastily away.
A Glock 46 lay tossed on the floor in a corner. I was pretty sure it was Brian’s gun, the same one he had fired at Elena.
Marek had his phone out, but he shook his head. “No reception.” There were call stations every mile along the tunnel, so we would have to drive to one of those to call the police.
My hands were shaking. I was trying to look anywhere but at the body. A pair of microscopes on a central table drew my attention. It occurred to me that whatever Brian had been studying was probably what got him killed. I peered into one of them. I couldn’t see anything.
“Shouldn’t we go?” Marek asked.
“We can’t help him now,” I said. “And there’s something here he wanted me to see. I just want to take a look, before the police come and trample everything.”
I searched for an electrical box, found it under the table among the snaking cables, and switched it on. Equipment hummed as it came to life and cooling fans spun up. I fitted my eye back into the microscope’s eyepiece and adjusted the focus. A digital readout told me the magnification and scale. The object in the scope was a tiny piezoelectric resonator, barely more than a micrometer in length, but gigantic compared to the size of an electron or any other particle in the quantum world. It took me a little tinkering to figure out the setup, but once I did I was able to send a tiny pulse of energy and set the resonator oscillating.
It was what we’d been working toward for years—a relatively “large” object displaying quantum effects. Considering that the resonator was not cryogenically cooled, this was a remarkable scientific feat all on its own. But there was another microscope. I switched eyepieces, already knowing what I would find. A second resonator, vibrating much like the first . . . except that it was not connected to the electrical source. I checked the computer readout and saw that the frequency and direction of the oscillation was the same as the first one. The two microscopes were right next to each other, but as far as the quantum world was concerned, it might as well be on the other side of the world.
“Um . . . Jacob?” Marek said.
My eye was still pasted to the microscope. “This is incredible. He’s actually demonstrated entanglement on a macro scale.” It was more than incredible. My mind was soaring with visions of ansibles and faster-than-light communication. It was the biggest discovery of the century. Why had it not been accomplished in the open, with journal publication and world fame? Why was Brian hiding underground in the bunker of an abandoned collider experiment?
“Jacob? Are you seeing this?” Marek asked.
I pulled away, a little annoyed to be interrupted, but my annoyance disappeared as soon as I saw what Marek was talking about. All around the makeshift lab, objects were now spinning. Soda cans rotated rapidly where they stood; ballpoint pens spun on their ends or on their sides; a coin twirled on a tabletop as if flicked. The swivel chair behind me whirled crazily. Marek was standing against the wall, his eyes wide. “What’s happening?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” I walked around the objects, peering at them from all sides. I gingerly tapped a Coke can, which dipped and then sprang right back up again like a gyroscope would. I went back to the microscope table and reached out to switch off the power, but as I did so, I caught sight of my reflection in a mirror on the wall. The mirror was the same as the one in Brian’s office, a cheap plastic variety with a gold-painted frame. It was a reverse image, the same as in his office, with one difference. The objects that were spinning on my side of the mirror weren’t spinning on the other side.
Impossible. I thought about what I was looking at. Millions of photons were striking the glass, knocking electrons into higher energy states, being absorbed and then emitted back again. Despite the fact that in most mirrors the light appeared to travel in straight lines, bouncing off the surface with an angle of incidence equal to the angle of reflection, I knew that wasn’t really what happened. Individual photons actually took a myriad of possible paths—all possible paths, in fact—from the source to the mirror, and then from the mirror to my eye. It was just the averaging out of probability waves that made it appear to reflect in straight lines. In this mirror, however, the probability waves averaged out to show me a reverse image, as if the light was coming from behind
the mirror instead of in front of it.
Hesitantly, I shifted my position so that I could see my own reflection, and once again, my image in the mirror had no eyes, just blank skin where the eyes should be. I felt my own eyes, and they were normal. The mirror figure did the same, touching the skin over its grotesquely missing eyes. I eased backward, reaching for the power switch again, only it was gone. Completely gone. I looked in the mirror, and there it was, just as it should have been. I was getting scared. Something was happening here that went way beyond the usual study of quantum effects. Something Brian had discovered that had terrified him and sent him running to knock on my door.
I was just thinking of running myself when the man with no eyes came out of the mirror. He didn’t step or climb through, as if the mirror were a window. He refracted through as beams of light, and as he did, his face split and angled as if seen through beveled glass. He was bright, brighter than the haphazard lighting in the room warranted. In the same moment that he appeared in the room, all the rotating objects froze, balanced where they stood as if captured in a photograph.
The lighting on him seemed wrong, and he moved his head from side to side as if he were seeing something else. Was he really standing there with us, or was he in some other room, in some other universe? Did he even know he was here? That question was quickly answered when he reached out and demolished a nearby computer screen. He touched it lightly with the back of a finger, as if stroking a lover’s face, but at his touch, the screen shattered, sending glass shards raining down on the desk.
I froze, too, my body disobeying my panicked signals to fight or flee.
“Where did that thing come from?” Marek shouted, backing up toward the door.
The man with no eyes had my basic height and weight and shape, but he was put together wrong, his ears a bit too small and mismatched, his jaw too big, his arms not quite connected right. His joints bent a bit too easily and in the wrong ways, as if someone who wasn’t quite sure how a human was supposed to work had put one together from spare parts.