A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1)

by Margaret Ball

  There is no door in the wall dividing the two parts. This is actually in deference to the sensibilities of non-Fellows, who might be perturbed at seeing the results of our research activities. To reach the inner section you need to visualize yourself walking a Möbius strip at right angles to and crossing the wall, which will in due time deposit you on the other side. People who can’t do that have to be escorted by one of us, and they sometimes get seasick. It makes recruiting for the Center simple: if you can’t get here, you don’t belong here.

  Dr. Verrick managed to stay invisible until late afternoon, when there was a decent chance that all three of his research fellows would have decided to pursue our research elsewhere, for instance, evaluating the temperature gradient between air and water in Barton Springs. It was May in Austin and the air conditioning in Allandale House was not really up to the task. However, research fellows are noted for their adaptability. With both of my colleagues out – Ingrid at a seminar and Ben who knows where - I stole their desk fans and waited for the boss in reasonable comfort.

  When he finally did show up, he did little but confirm Bradislav-the-Spook’s story. Yes, the Center was actually funded by a government agency that preferred to remain anonymous; yes, the Spook was a representative of that agency; and yes, we really did have to cooperate with any reasonable requests that he made.

  I could see some wriggle room in that word “reasonable,” but Dr. Verrick left it there with a promise that there would be a meeting the next morning at which Everything would be Clarified.

  "You'd have to hear this jerk to believe him, Ingrid." I lay back on the living room floor and poured some more water on my chest. As long as my T-shirt was soaking wet I could pretend that the air sighing out of our ancient window unit was actually cooling the place down.

  Ingrid Thorn, my colleague and roomie, never did anything so uncouth as pouring water over her body. Mind you, it was just as well she didn't make a habit of it. With what she had under her blouse, she'd probably be responsible for a breakdown of civil order if she ever cooled herself off that way in public. I, on the other hand, could have stood under a sprinkler for half an hour and then walked through the math department without eliciting any reaction other than, "Hey, Kostis, did you know your hair is wet?"

  Ingrid shrugged. "Maybe I'll get the chance tomorrow. You did say, a staff meeting?"

  "Ten o'clock.” Dr. Verrick, being one himself, understands that topologists are not morning people. “In the break room, like always." We didn't exactly need an auditorium for Dr. Verrick to speak with all three of us. On the other hand… "It may be a little crowded if this Bradislav Lensky shows up."

  "One guy? We've got eight chairs in there. Not a problem."

  "I... don't know. He has this way of taking up space. You should have seen him, Ingrid, he dragged a chair right up to my desk and straddled it and leaned. I felt like he was trying to dominate me.”

  "He should be so lucky! I've been trying to dominate you into not taking long showers in the small hours ever since we moved into this place."

  Ingrid wasn't all that interested in my personal hygiene; it was just that the pipes in this apartment building clanked and groaned and generally carried on like the ghost of Hamlet’s father whenever one of the tenants asked them to do something like, oh, providing water. "There are eight apartments in this building. Somebody's always going to be using the plumbing. You need to learn to sleep through it, Princess."

  Ingrid stopped unplaiting the braids she wore wrapped around her head all day and threw a Kleenex box at me. "Remind me again why I share living space with an unsocialized infant like you."

  "Because you can't afford a place this close to campus on your own, and you don't dare share with anybody else."

  It was, after all, the same reason why I put up with her and her yards of blonde hair and her D-cups and her exalted status as an actual graduate student who might get a Ph.D. some day. Neither of us could risk having a normal roommate who might freak out over us making buttons dance in mid-air or scooting a couple of feet forward without visible means of propulsion.

  "If this Lensky comes to the meeting tomorrow, you'll see..."

  "What I don't see," said Ingrid, "is why you can't stop going on about this man you talked to for all of fifteen minutes. Is he incredibly handsome or something?"

  "Or something. Not exactly pretty." I knew, because I could still see his arrogant face clearly when I thought about him. "Good body, though."

  "Ha! I knew it! He's hot, isn't he? And you're crushing on him."

  "Don't be silly. He's annoying, is what he is." I reflected for a moment. I had been very briefly interested in making him happy... before he started laying down the law. "To be fair... I guess he would be kind of hot - if he weren't so obnoxious. You'll see tomorrow."

  Chapter 2

  The break room, like most of the Center’s space, is on the public side of the top floor, so anybody at all can show up there. It’s not intrinsically a bad room: a nice long solid table, a row of cute little Gothic windows high on the outside wall, a few chairs, and a cabinet where we keep the coffee mugs and other supplies. We don’t get a lot of visitors, because the coffee is really bad and the doughnuts disappear quickly and let’s face it, how many people are longing for a nice conversation with a math nerd?

  Well, Vern Trexler, but he was an aberration. When I got in on Tuesday morning he was already in the break room, sitting tilted back in his chair with his feet on the table. “Thalia, I need to talk to you.” He did the sad-puppy-eyes thing at me. The guy wasn’t actually repulsive: floppy hair, big brown eyes… Full, moist, quivering lower lip. Okay, that was kind of repulsive.

  “Maybe some other time, Vern? We’re about to have a staff meeting here.” The ‘other time’ I had in mind would involve ice-skating in Hell, but there was no need to be explicit and hurt his feelings.

  “Well, that’s what I want to talk about, Thalia. Staffing. Haven’t you read my application?”

  If you can’t say anything nice, lie. “No. And it’s Lia.”

  “You should look. I’ve explained time travel. See, time isn’t really directional: it’s, like, this fourth dimension and we can go either direction along it.”

  He must have been reading pulp science fiction from the ‘40’s to come up with that staggeringly original idea. It was also staggeringly wrong, but of course I wasn’t allowed to tell him how I knew that.

  “Why won’t you pay attention to my application? Are you afraid I’ll show you up? You really need some creative people here, you know.” The longer he talked, the more the underlying whiny tone of his voice came out.

  The thought of sharing office space with Vern the Whiner made my skin creep. I did feel sorry for him; he was graduating this year and clearly wasn’t going to go on to graduate school in math. He’d probably wind up doing some clerical job for the State of Texas. He was desperate to get back in with the cool kids. And since he was the only person in the world who thought we were the cool kids, I really should have liked him better than I did.

  “Vern, I’m not in charge of hiring. Dr. Verrick is. You need to submit your job applications to him.” There’s a reason why I put that in the plural.

  “I tried, but he said he isn’t paid enough to read any more reasons why he ought to hire me.” The whine was coming through loud and clear.

  “Well, neither am I. And you need to leave before the meeting.”

  “Yes, but…” More whining incoming.

  “Go away, Vern.” I put enough of a snarl into my own voice to make him ooze out of the room, and busied myself re-stacking the clean coffee cups until he was gone.

  “Good job, Lia.” Ben Sutherland was seated at the far end of the table with a yellow legal pad in front of him. The floppy brown hair over his forehead looked more natural on him than the same style did on Vern, or maybe it was just that his was the result of not getting a haircut often enough while Vern’s was the perfectly blow-dried and combed produ
ct of his barber. Vern… Wait a minute. I’d missed something, hadn’t I? “When did you come in?”

  “Part way through your attempts to evict Trexler.” He looked remarkably self-satisfied. “I was testing a new algorithm. It camouflages me with open subsets of the background. I got the idea from Photoshop.”

  “How do you place them?” Then the penny dropped. “You rat. You were hiding and waiting for me to throw him out. Sticking me with the dirty work, as usual.”

  “It’s just that you’ve got such a talent for alienating people,” said Ingrid, coming in. “Why haven’t you refilled the coffee maker?”

  I sketched a bow in the general direction of her coronet of blond braids. “It’s just that you’ve got such a talent for carrying water, Ingrid.”

  Fortunately for the peace of the Center, Dr. Verrick showed up just then with the spook.

  “Ah, good, you’re all here already.” His fringe of white hair was more frazzled than usual, and Lensky looked unhappy. He cheered up, though, when he saw the sign over the cabinet. “Coffee and doughnuts?”

  “The coffee maker is empty,” Ingrid said.

  “And the doughnuts seem to be gone.” Lensky looked mournfully at the empty tray.

  Dr. Verrick does frequently bring doughnuts, though he hadn’t bothered today; I think he considers it a morale-raising gesture. But they never last more than five minutes, which makes the sign superfluous. Still, Ben had spent an hour with stencils to create the neat lettering that read “THESE ARE COFFEE CUPS,” on one side of the sign, and “THESE ARE DOUGHNUTS,” on the other. It didn’t cost anything to leave it in place.

  “Right, then,” Dr. Verrick said. “Everybody please take a seat, then I’m turning this meeting over to Mr. Bradislav Lensky, a representative of our sponsor with a problem he wishes us to work on.”

  Lensky strolled back from the cabinet to stand at the head of the table. “The agency I work for has picked up chatter and email which suggests there is a group smuggling terrorists over the border and hiding them in a ‘safe house’ somewhere here in Austin.”

  “What agency would that be?” Ben interrupted. “It doesn’t sound like something the Moore Foundation would be interested in.”

  “It’s not,” Lensky said, “but the Foundation actually channels funding from my agency to you people.”

  “And your agency is…?”

  “Need-to-know, and you don’t need. I’m your liaison.”

  “With some nameless three-letter agency,” Ben muttered.

  Lensky gave him a grim smile. “Exactly. Now that we’ve cleared up that little matter….”

  “Or obfuscated it?”

  “Oooh, a spook!” Ingrid cooed. “It’s not Bradislav, it’s…Boris. Where’s Natasha?” She was a big fan of “Rocky and Bullwinkle.” She’d even gone to see the movie as a child.

  Lensky ignored her and kept going. “What I need from you is a comprehensive list of everybody in this people-smuggling operation, their contacts, and, if at all possible, the location of their ‘safe house.’”

  “Can’t the NSA do that?”

  “There are sometimes slight difficulties with inter-agency cooperation. And there is a time factor here. Recent chatter points to an upcoming ‘party.’ We believe that’s code for a major terrorist action here in Austin. It’s imperative we identify the individuals involved, and their location, before that time.”

  “And just why should we help you persecute immigrants, Boris?” Ingrid demanded. “Don’t you realize that Austin is a sanctuary city?”

  “Not immigrants,” Lensky said. “Illegal aliens. Terrorists.”

  Reluctantly, I gave him some points for talking to Ingrid’s face instead of to her breasts.

  “So you say! They’re probably innocent people just trying to get away from the violence of their home countries.”

  “That is not your call to make.”

  Ingrid Thorn was the only person I knew who could flounce while seated in a straight-backed office chair. “Well, I just hope that if I’m ever forced to flee my war-torn country, I’ll be greeted by people a little more open-minded than you!”

  “I’m sure I can leave this in your very capable hands,” said Dr. Verrick. He knew when to make himself scarce.

  Ingrid, Ben and I looked at each other after the boss escaped.

  “Who wants to break it to him?” Ingrid said eventually.

  “You go first,” I suggested to Ben. “Explain the limitations of applied topology.”

  Ben sighed deeply and pushed the hair off his forehead. “Look, ‘Boris,’ we’ve only just discovered this phenomenon. We’re in the very, very, very earliest stages of figuring out how it works. No, scratch that. We don’t have the foggiest idea how it works, but we’ve started figuring out what we can do with it despite our near-total ignorance.”

  There was a reason I had pushed Ben to do the explaining. Of the three of us, he was the one most comfortable with phrases like “our near-total ignorance.” Ingrid and I preferred to describe our situation as “open research.”

  As in, wide open. As in, so wide open that we had no clue what we were doing.

  But with the spook clearly thinking of us as some kind of action team of super-beings with super-powers, we needed Ben to disillusion him with the humiliating truth that we were more like a few lost souls groping around in an undefined non-metric space.

  “But you can do some things that aren’t… possible in the real world.”

  “If we do them,” Ingrid snapped, “they are, by definition, possible in the real world.”

  “Real or not real,” Ben returned to his point, “they’re just not… very impressive… in any world. You need to understand that… Boris. We visualize certain topological elements and align them with real-world places and things. Ingrid can move small objects. Lia can move herself about two feet by the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem.”

  “The what?”

  “It’s a statement about a continuous function of a compact convex set onto itself.”

  That was nasty; he knew perfectly well that wouldn’t clarify a damn thing for Lensky. And anyway, it was a lemma of that theorem that I used, identifying the point where I was with the place I wanted to be and visualizing a continuous function of reality onto itself. (Lensky tells me this isn’t any clearer than what Ben said. This is the last time I let him read anything I’ve written.)

  “And I’ve been working on a personal camouflage system.”

  Ben went briskly on without detailing just how his new algorithm worked. “All of us can cross barriers by mentally walking along a Möbius strip; we don’t know yet whether it’s easier because we’re moving ourselves from one side of a space to the other, or because we’re physically moving at the same time. Or for some other reason that we haven’t thought of yet.”

  “Aren’t you leaving something out?”

  Ben shook his head.

  “Oh, come on. When I walked in here Thalia was asking you how you had made yourself invisible.”

  I did rather like the way he said my name, with a broad “a”: “Thah-lya.” Didn’t even come close to rhyming with ‘failure.’ Much better than the usual “Thay-li-uh.”

  “Unnoticeable, not invisible,” Ben corrected him. “You should think of it as a type of camouflage. I haven’t yet proved that it establishes true invisibility.”

  “Tomato, tomahto.”

  All three of us glared at him. We’re mathematicians. We don’t deal in approximations or it’s-all-the-same-thing rationalizations.

  I had to admire the way Lensky stood up to our combined stare. Strong men have been known to wilt and put away their calculators under the glower of all three Center Research Fellows. Lensky didn’t even look away.

  “You can do teleportation.” His blue eyes pinned me like a bug in his collection. “Telekinesis.” Ingrid got the treatment. “Invisibility.” Back to Ben. “You people can be very useful to me. You’re just trying to wriggle out of it.”


  “Ingrid,” I said wearily, “would you bring something over from the coffee cabinet?”

  She closed her eyes and moved her lips soundlessly. There was a furious jiggling in the condiments rack; then a plastic stir stick dropped on the table in front of her.

  “Thank you. Now how about a sugar packet?”

  This took longer. Eventually a pinch of brown sugar fell onto the table.

  “Ingrid can’t move an entire sugar packet,” I explained to Lensky. “It’s too heavy. The best she could do was to move a little sugar out of the packet.”

  “Without tearing it!” The man was determined to be impressed. I soldiered on.

  “If you’d like, I can go to my office and get the plastic pieces I use for set selections, and you can verify that they too aren’t very heavy.” I wasn’t eager to demonstrate the measly six to twenty-four inches that constituted my current teleportation range, so I tried to focus his attention on the accidental telekinesis that started this whole thing.

  “Poker chips,” Lensky said, “and Darth Vader. And other action figurines.”

  I was surprised. He flashed a tight smile. “What, you think I’m totally unobservant? Noticing things like that is in my job description. And even granting you have some limitations, you people can make yourselves useful. I want a look inside one of our suspects’ computers. A man called Raven Crowson. I don’t have enough for a warrant. But you should be able to get access by changing bits inside the computer. Little, light things moving very tiny distances. Piece of cake, right?”