“Yes, there was. Though as is often the case in this kind of thing, it was—at least to some extent—little more than a formality. In fact, many of the team members had already been working with the professor for some time, before the project was funded and the open call was announced. Some, however, were new and were recruited for the first time through the call. Clearly, some of the investigation’s most intense scrutiny focused on them….”
“How many were there on the team, in all?”
“A dozen, I think. Of whom over half, I’d say, already worked with the professor. In any case, I believe the records have already been looked at quite carefully in the appropriate quarters….”
“I’d like to see them anyway, if possible. They may not have looked for what I’m trying to find.”
And the professor went back to looking at Helias quizzically, wondering what was brewing in that head of his.
“I can try to ask the counselor. He should already be back on Thaýma now. He’s got the clout to root out just about anything….”
“Yeah….” replied Helias, again lost in thought.
“I’ll send him a message straightaway.” said the professor, turning to the computer and beginning to dictate.
“Wait a minute…. Don’t send that yet. Ask him for information about a certain Rosa Stawinski, born on Thaýma around ninety years ago.”
“How’s it spelled? I can try to do a search myself, for that….”
Helias spelled the name and the professor typed it in the search box. No hits. Just a namesake in her forties.
The professor sent the message, with the two requests. And Helias marveled at how that message would be sent backwards in time and travel for more than a year and a half before reaching its destination on Thaýma. Where it would be answered, and the answer would take the same amount of time, but in the opposite direction, and would reach them slightly after their first message was sent.
And so it was, in fact. The secretary had answered, after calling the counselor who was away from the office. He had attached the records, and now Helias, with the professor translating, pored intently over the pages.
At a certain point he let out a sigh and sank back into his seat.
“Found something?” asked the professor.
“Yes and no. New questions, more than anything. Look at these four names here: we need to find out what their jobs were after the call…. As I suspected, perhaps instead of looking at the applicants who were hired, it would have been better to focus on the ones who weren’t. Look here: all four had worked with Nudeliev before, and they failed to meet the cut by the barest margin, but if you look at their vita and so forth, they certainly don’t seem any less qualified than the successful candidates….”
“Maybe they screwed up on the exam or fluffed their interview….”
“Yes, in fact it was the interview that was their downfall. If they hadn’t made such a bad showing there, they would have been among the top picks. And yet you told me that it should have been little more than a formality. And anyway, what weight can an interview have, since Nudeliev already knew them well? Everything makes me think that Nudeliev didn’t want them, despite their long-standing work with him and their professional ability….”
“But Nudeliev wasn’t the only one assessing candidates at the interview, there were at least some other members of the committee….”
“Well, all your friend had to do was cook up some questions he knew they wouldn’t be able to answer, deliberately sinking them….”
“But why?…”
“That’s something we can ask him directly…. But first we’ve got to know where they were employed afterwards.”
“So you’re thinking there was a sort of vendetta, engineered by people who knew exactly what to do, who knew the systems and the precautions that the professor usually adopted perfectly well, and perhaps jumped at the chance to sell themselves to potential competitors?”
“Who knows?…” laconically answered an Helias who was now more pensive than ever.
With the professor who was beginning to be irritated by this uncommunicativeness. And by this reversal of roles, where now it was the ‘young man’ who was calling the shots, and he who was supposed to be hanging on his every word.
Helias had a quick look at the second attachment, asking the professor to translate a couple of words he didn’t understand. There weren’t more than a dozen lines and, while skimming through them, Helias nodded to himself from time to time.
Then came a moment when the professor felt he could regain his rightful role and turn the tables again. It was when Helias asked “Do you know why my parents, two earthlings, worked for you Thaymites?”
The professor, with obvious satisfaction, assumed his lecture-room manner and drew breath for a long, deeply self-indulgent answer. But then he realized that he didn’t have any particular answer to give, or at least not the one Helias was after, and, disappointed, tossed out an anything-but-academic “Well, I wouldn’t know…, sometimes earthlings with specific abilities are invited to collaborate with….”. But he broke off, because Helias, caught up in his own musings, wasn’t even listening.
Exasperated, his words came out almost as a shout: “And you, do you know? Say something, for god’s sake. What’s running through your mind? Out with it!”.
Helias slowly raised his eyes and turned toward him, teasingly.
“You will know in due time.” he said, sententiously but with a smile.
So there! It was his own little way of getting his own back, against all things Thaymite.
At that point the professor, grumbling under his breath, had left the office for the adjoining room. Where the refrigerator was. The fridge that, judging from the noises Helias heard, had been expertly raided by the time the professor returned a few minutes later, visibly more relaxed but still determinedly sulking.
Then the professor, without saying a word, had set himself to composing the new message with the request for information about the four unsuccessful candidates.
The answer had come after several silent, interminable minutes. The professor had read it and, still without speaking, had turned the screen toward Helias. Once again, it was the secretary who had answered. Nothing. No record of where the foursome had been employed subsequently. Nothing, for all four of them. Hardly likely to be a coincidence.
Then Helias, remorse vying with annoyance at the professor’s pouting silence, had decided to tell him his theories, while leaving out a few decisive details that he wasn’t sure about yet. Essentially, he had given him a general outline, something they could discuss and that was still open to various interpretations, but without revealing his own conclusions.
Initially, the professor had wrinkled his nose and made objection after objection. Then, as Helias continued to explain his reasoning, he had—however grudgingly—been obliged to concede that Helias’s argument at least held water, and that there must have been a modicum of truth in it.
Together, they decided to make a visit to Professor Nudeliev, to ask him a few questions and see how he reacted. Or at least the professor was left with the impression that the decision had been made together. In reality, the visit had been in Helias’s plans for quite some time.
A back-now for Thaýma was scheduled for half an hour later. They would thus be boarding in the afternoon. They had had themselves put through to the counselor on his direct line, to inform him of their arrival and of the planned visit to Nudeliev, but without providing further details.
There was plenty of time for lunch, which they ate together in the dining hall, and for Helias to have a long walk on the lakeshore, where he gave his memories free rein. Memories of Kathia, of his parents, of what had happened to him since he first arrived at the Kusmiri Center, down to the unsettling encounter of the evening before. Then, before the final preparations for the trip, Helias spent half an hour at the computer, searching the web. Afterwards, he opened one of the desk drawers and sat contemplating
the long, curving object half hidden among the sheets of paper. It took him a while to make up his mind. Then he checked the charge.
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017
Massimo VillataThe Dark Arrow of TimeScience and Fictionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67486-5_15
15. In that Moment, Helias Could Remember Very Little of His Conjectures
Massimo Villata1
(1)Osservatorio Astrofisico di Torino, INAF, Pino Torinese (TO), Italy
Massimo Villata
Email: [email protected]
In that moment, Helias could remember very little of his conjectures about Professor Nudeliev, of his discussion with Professor Borodine a few hours earlier, and of the questions he had planned to ask the project leader.
He had the same feeling he usually had before the exams. When, after prolonged swotting—and a certain amount of time trying to second-guess the questions and picture what the exam would be like—the hour would come, and with it, the realization that nothing was the way he had imagined it, and the only thing left to do was empty out his mind, a clean sweep, and listen to the questions, the real ones, concentrating on the present, the here and now, the only present that counts.
But he didn’t understand why he should feel he was sitting an exam; after all, he hadn’t come to be quizzed, but to do the quizzing. Then he saw that it was in fact his own answers that had to be put to the test, the answers he had already formulated in his mind, and that the real question now was how these answers measured up against the yardstick of reality.
Or maybe it was also the fact of being face to face with an eminent professor and scientist, and a Thaymite to boot, who was now regarding him with a steady proctorial eye, exactly as if he were the hapless examinee. And he was so different from how Helias had imagined him. So different from the professor, or rather from George, as he called him.
“How are you doing, George? You’re looking well. If you had let me know earlier that you were coming, I could have organized something…”
It sounded a bit like a reproach, and Helias wondered if the two professors had always been so formal with each other, or whether the formality was because of his presence.
“You’re looking well too, Valeri. I apologize for practically bursting in on you like this, but it was decided on the spur of the moment, and it’s not just a courtesy call. Dr. Kadler and I urgently needed to talk to you about certain matters concerning…”
Whereupon Valeri Nudeliev, murmuring some polite formula that Helias didn’t understand, once again looked the young visitor over and shook his hand.
The two professors were speaking to each other in European—Nudeliev, who was clearly less accustomed to the language, a bit stiltedly—so that Helias would not feel left out.
They were in the scientist’s lavish residence, overlooking the sea. A sprawling one-storied villa, with the full complement of swimming pool, gardens and miscellaneous Thaymite amenities which, to tell the truth, were very much at odds with the austere figure of the professor. That was the biggest difference between Nudeliev and his colleague Borodine, as well as from the person Helias had pictured, aside from being a few years younger and very much thinner: that austere aspect, a bit like that of the counselor, with his deep-set, inquisitorial eyes.
Perhaps all that luxury and all those comforts were more a reflection of the rest of the family. Because Nudeliev had a family, even if the place seemed deserted at the moment. No sign even of servants, though a setup of that size and scale clearly didn’t run itself.
After a few more pleasantries, Professor Nudeliev invited them to follow him to his studio, where he evidently felt more at ease.
Here Borodine gave him a short summary of the latest developments, which Nudeliev, enthroned behind his massive desk, received without emotion, clearly having hear some of this before.
Helias was seething with impatience. Not so much for the questions he wanted to ask, which kept surfacing in his mind, but for that casual, even rambling, tack that the conversation between the two professors had taken, all while he had an exam to get through, and mounting nerves. And not least because of the glances that Nudeliev continued to darted at him.
At a certain point, he took advantage of a brief lull to join the conversation. Or rather, he broke into it, with the question that was uppermost in his mind.
“Professor Nudeliev, why according to you was your system hacked three years ago, when the product of your research was, as far as was known at the time, not ready yet and…”
As was to be expected, the atmosphere in the room turned decidedly frosty. Helias saw that George was looking at him with distaste, for having so cavalierly kicked over his whole, carefully constructed diplomatic edifice. Nudeliev shot a look at him, somewhere between surprised and pleased, but otherwise unperturbed.
Borodine was about to speak, but Nudeliev stopped him with a raised hand.
“Right. Let’s lay our cards on the table, then. Sorry George, but I was getting a bit tired of all this circling around, too. Much better to speak openly. I’m no fool, and I had figured you were here to ask me precise questions, because in one way or another you have doubts about my conduct. As for your particular question, Dr. Kadler, my most obvious answer would be that I know no more than you do, or, if you like, that I have no idea.”
Helias had rarely heard a more sibylline answer. It was clear that Nudeliev was waiting for more questions, to find out how much they knew, or had guessed. And Helias did not make him wait long.
“Professor, when did you involve Simona Villardo, daughter of Rosa Stawinski, a native of Thaýma, and of her earthling partner, Marko Villardo, in your project? And why did you involve her and her husband, both earthlings, in a Thaymite project?”
“I didn’t know that you were aware of the origins of your family, Dr. Kadler….”
“I wasn’t, in fact. As is obvious, I was kept in the dark about them. But, as you can see, I found out on my own. I just connected the dots between the fact that my parents worked with the Thaymites, and the haziness about my grandmother that prevailed in my family. But answer my questions, please.”
“Certainly. Your parents knew of your grandmother’s origins and thus knew of Thaýma’s existence, and, from a scientific as well as a personal standpoint, were obviously fascinated by it. So it was by no means difficult to recruit them for a Thaymite scientific project, especially such an intriguing one. They both had excellent minds and, even more to our advantage, were already working at the Martian station, which was ideal for our experiments for a number of reasons, including its distance from Thaýma and the fact that being run entirely by earthlings put it beyond suspicion.”
“So you were already at the experimental stage, top secret.”
“In fact. We started the experiments that involved them a little less than a year before the events that led to the project’s discontinuation.”
“What kind of work are you doing now, Professor?”
Nudeliev studied Helias at length before answering. And, with the conversation turning into a grilling, Borodine, too, gave him another look of reproof.
“It seems to me that we’re straying off the subject…. Anyway, nothing special, since then I’ve gone back to my academic commitments and am mostly concerned with theory, again in connection with time transfers.”
“When did you hire Kathia Cousins for the first time?”
This time Professor Nudeliev shifted in his seat, at least, blinking repeatedly.
“A little before the Kadlers were brought on board. We could trust Simona, if for no other reason than her Thaymite descent, but we had no guarantees that your father would accept the job and keep the secret. So I sent Cousins to Earth, at a time when your father was there, to ‘spy’ on him, in the guise of a graduate student who was looking for a faculty advisor….”
“So that’s why my father recognized her after he was wounded on Mars, or rather, he mistook the other Kathia—Kathia Bodieur—for
her. But that doesn’t explain why he feared her, or at least regarded her with suspicion. Unless there’s more to it. Unless he knew that that person was working for someone hostile to him….”
A long pause followed. If Nudeliev’s aim was to find out how much they knew, Helias’s tactic was to feed him that information piecemeal, making him tense enough that sooner or later he’d make a mistake. And to some extent the tactic was working: Nudeliev had forgotten to protest when Helias had said ‘for the first time’, implicitly admitting that there had been a second time, when, recently, Kathia Cousins had been hired to impersonate ‘his’ Kathia.
Helias felt that the time had come to up the ante and, almost automatically, his hand slid slowly toward the side pocket of his trousers, hidden from Nudeliev’s sight by the desk between them.
In the pregnant hiatus that followed Helias’s last words, his voice was heard again, in measured, neutral tones: “Do you know a certain Geremy Stuerz, Professor?”
Perhaps Helias was expecting a simple ‘No.’ But the professor turned a long penetrating gaze on him. Then, leaning back in his chair and without taking his eyes off him, said “Go on, please.”
“I’ve known him for a long time. Not well, but for a number of years, at college. I wouldn’t be able to say exactly when I met him. But Professor Borodine made me think yesterday, when he said that perhaps Stuerz, too, had been sent to Earth to watch me, after the message was found that my mother left at the station at the time of the attack, before disappearing together with my father. But something didn’t add up. I remember at least one occasion, before my parents’ disappearance, when he was hanging around. So he must have been there for another purpose. That was the three-month period between the hacking and the attack on my folks. Let’s add another detail. When we were at the Martian station, the pilot, who along with Spitzer was later found to be an imposter, at one point told the captors not to harm my parents, and that they would be punished if they did, because my parents were of more use safe and sound. It almost seems as if the attack was more of an attempt at kidnapping than cybertheft. In which case: why did my parents have to be kidnapped? So that they could continue to work on the project, as the only ones who had certain essential information? That could be, though from what you told me before, it doesn’t seem likely….”
The Dark Arrow of Time Page 20