Twistor

by Cramer, John; Wolfe, Gene;

  Saxon felt suddenly sick, as if he'd been punched in the stomach. He looked down at the devices. His mind whirled. Pierce would do this, that filthy son of a bitch, he thought. He turned to Harrison, looking him straight in the eyes. 'I know nothing of this, Harrison, nothing at all. You're sure they're bugs?'

  'We could see on the 'scope that they were broadcasting our voices, and a few minutes ago Sam Weston cut one of them open and found a tiny microphone inside. We're as sure as we can be without catching the guy who planted them. I'd be careful about what you say on the telephone, too. Sam says telephone surveillance and voice surveillance usually go together. Allan, could this have anything to do with your business ventures?'

  Saxon spread his hands. 'I would not have thought anything connected with my business was worth spying on. Our new work here is the only thing that makes any sense. But I haven't mentioned it to a soul.' He looked sharply at Harrison. 'Have you?'

  Harrison ignored the question. 'Look, Allan, this bugging incident demonstrates the futility of trying to keep our twistor discovery secret. These little things aren't cheap.' He gestured at the bugs. 'Sam says they probably cost a thousand dollars each. Somebody with enough money to buy sophisticated, expensive equipment is out there on the other end of those bugs. They've heard everything we've said for the past few days, and they surely know what we've got. If there ever was a reason for keeping our work under wraps, that reason no longer exists. We've got to get our discovery out in the open, where it belongs.'

  Saxon glared at Harrison, searching for a way to refute his argument. 'What are you driving at?' he said finally.

  'I've been writing papers,' said Harrison. Tm almost finished with one describing the experiment and one about the equipment. I'd like to finish them off, with your help if possible, and send them off for publication as soon as we can. Once that is done, there won't be any point in bugging anyone.'

  Later, when Allan Saxon calmed down, he remembered losing his temper at that point. He couldn't quite remember all that he had said to Harrison, but the gist of it was that they needed tighter, not looser, security. The only way to achieve it was to move the whole experiment to the company laboratories in Bellevue so that it could be better protected. Harrison had objected and he'd ordered him out of his office. You just can't get good, loyal, respectful postdocs any more, he thought.

  On Fifteenth Avenue Northeast at the western edge of the main campus a nondescript commercial van was parked. The balding man eased into the driver's seat, started the engine, and drove unhurriedly away from the university in the direction of the 1-5 freeway.

  He shook his head as he drove, wondering what could have gone wrong. Something must have alerted the subjects in the physics laboratory to the fact that their room had been bugged. They must have found both of them, too. The devices had gone dead within five minutes of each other. About half an hour later he had heard someone come into the professor's office, and the units there had gone dead, too.

  But dammit, these people were supposed to be amateurs! It required the latest and most sophisticated detection equipment to find bugs like these. It just didn't make sense.

  Well, at least the telephone taps were still in operation. Those didn't broadcast. One simply dialed into them and 'milked' them once a day. He'd need advice now from Broadsword on how to proceed. Broadsword was not going to be pleased.

  11

  Saturday Evening, October 9

  David backed carefully out of his parking slot in front of his apartment on Fuhrman Avenue, drove west past the Red Robin, and turned north onto Eastlake. Half a block ahead, red lights began to flash on the University Bridge. Damn, David thought, somehow that bridge always decided to go up when he was in a hurry. But checking his watch, he saw that he had enough time.

  The north end of Seattle is separated from the rest of the city by the Lake Washington Ship Canal, a man-made channel that cuts from Puget Sound on the west to Lake Washington on the east. The break is stitched back together by seven bridges. Two of these are high fixed spans, but the other five, the old University Bridge among them, are low to the water and must be opened whenever a sailboat toots its horn.

  David drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, watching as the lights flashed, the red-and-white-striped barriers unfolded like Japanese paper cranes, and the steel lattice bridge spans levered upward, slackening the electric trolley wires they supported. He turned on the car stereo and pushed the selector button for KING-FM, a classical music station that he liked. The music soothed away his minor feelings of annoyance. He watched as the mast tip of a lone sailboat passed at a leisurely pace across his field of view. Then the bridge lowered and reassembled itself, the lights stopped flashing, and the barriers retracted. He was feeling pretty good after his shower, he decided, and he looked forward to the evening ahead. His feeling of paranoia after the bugging incident had passed. It was probably Allan's problem, he thought as he accelerated over the bridge to Eleventh Northeast, not his or Vickie's.

  He turned west onto Northeast Forty-fifth Street and headed away from the university in the direction of the Wallingford district. After a while he began to look for a street sign indicating Densmore Avenue North. He found it just beyond Wallingford Avenue, but then had to circle around a playfield that interrupted the street before he reached Vickie's house.

  From a previous visit he knew that the bell didn't work and that Vickie's housemates often didn't answer a knock at the front door, so he simply let himself in. Vickie's brother William, a textbook in his lap, was sitting on the faded orange living-room sofa facing the dim flatscreen wall TV, an MTV rock band gyrating in the background. He waved as David entered.

  'Hi, Flash! Is Vickie ready?' David asked. He wondered if she'd had that kind of acne as a teenager. Probably not; her complexion was quite good.

  'She said to tell you that she'd be a few minutes more. Have a seat, David.'

  'OK,' said David, sitting gingerly on the sofa to avoid a protruding spring. 'How are things at Roosevelt High? You get into that science fiction class you wanted?' David had discovered last month that he and Flash shared an interest in science fiction. It had been the single contact point from which he'd been able to reach Vickie's younger brother. He remembered that Flash had been trying to get into an honors English class called 'Science Fiction and Universal Philosophy' or some such.

  Flash nodded without enthusiasm. 'Yeah, but it's a mite weird-o. First we had to read some New Age crap about Hinduism. Then Mr Rebarth made us read The Martian Chronicles. I hated it even the first time I read it, which this wasn't. It's terminally artsy-fartsy dumb-o.'

  David nodded in sympathy. He'd never had much appreciation for Bradbury's free-form approach to scientific facts.

  'After that we did a unit on Buddhism, and that was paired with Starship Troopers. That old Heinlein thing might be OK, if you'd never been shown the glaring holes in it by reading The Forever War.'

  David blinked. He'd enjoyed Starship Troopers when he read it years ago. He coveted some of those early Heinleins for his collection of SF hardcovers, but after the author died in '88 the prices for his first editions had become astronomical.

  'Now we're doing Neuromancer,' Flash continued, 'which Mr Rebarth says signaled a new direction in the late eighties toward hi-tech cyberpunk. Yuck-o! Punk-tech is more like it. Jeese, this Gibson individual must never have heard about bandwidth or transmission-speed limits. He thinks that once you plug the wires into your damp little head, you can download the whole universe in zero time-o. He oughta try downloading a coupla megabytes over a 4800-baud line sometime, if he's got a few spare hours. But Mr Rebarth thinks cyberpunk is just wonderful because it makes you think about the disenchantment of the postmodern era, and it's so technologically realistic. Jeese-o!'

  'I hope you're not letting him get away with anything,' David inserted noncommittally.

  'When it gets really deep-o, I mostly just hang quiet,' said Flash. 'After class I just mosey up to Mr Rebarth a
nd get him to tell me what he wants me to tell him in the writing assignments. Then I just give it back to him verbate-o. He says he just loves my work because it contains so many good ideas, and it's so well thought out, so I get me a good grade-o. Teachers just love fresh new ideas, as long as they've seen 'em before. Isn't that the way it's always been in high school?' He looked owlishly at David.

  David paused for a moment, then nodded. 'I guess it has,' he said finally. Well, that kills this topic, he thought. Wonder what we can talk about next.

  At that moment, however, he was saved from further discursive struggles by the appearance of a transfigured Vickie. She was wearing a scoop-neck creation of white knit that looked both expensive and fashionable. She was very beautiful, he realized, and he felt suddenly disoriented, tongue-tied and awkward for the first time in recent memory. Then Vickie smiled her familiar smile and his perception shifted, his self-possession returned. He told her how wonderful she looked. She whispered some admonishment to Flash, and they walked together to David's car.

  David glanced back at the house. Flash was standing on the porch watching their departure, a bemused expression on his face.

  Ray's Boat House was on Shilshole Bay, just north of the channel to the Chittenden Locks that isolated the fluctuating tides and salt water of Puget Sound from the unvarying level of fresh water in Salmon Bay, Lake Union, and Lake Washington. The view from their table – of the sound backed by the snow-dusted Olympic Range – was breathtaking this evening as the sun lowered to meet the jagged horizon. This evening the view was spiced by the varied boat traffic traveling to and from the locks.

  David liked Ray's. It was probably the best seafood restaurant in Seattle, though old-timers always claimed it had possessed more character before it had burned to the water and been rebuilt a few years earlier. He'd been lucky tonight; with only two hours' notice he had been able to reserve his favorite southwest corner table. David considered his sudden impulse to bring Vickie here. This was an upscale, pricey restaurant. Was he trying to impress her? Was he matching Vickie against Sarah, who didn't like the place? Sarah preferred the Windjammer further down, with its view of the yacht moorages.

  He looked across the table at Victoria. He still couldn't quite believe the transformation. She was ravishing in that white dress. He took a deep breath. They had already ordered and were working on their salads, and the waiter now brought the bottle of the Hugel Gewürztraminer that David had selected. David sniffed and then sipped. 'Good nose, good balance,' he pronounced. This place has very good whites,' he said to Vickie, 'and this Alsatian is one of their best. It's light and flowery, and it tricks you into thinking that it's going to be sweet until your taste buds sort out its balance and finish.'

  'Couldn't prove it by me,' said Vickie. She studied the sunset through the pale amber liquid, sniffed, sipped it gently, and nodded. 'It does smell a bit like flowers, though. I got that part, even though I come from a family of beer drinkers. Hmmm, Chateau La Tour and now Gewürztraminer. How does one learn to be a wine snob, David? Looks like fun.' Her compressed smile showed that she was teasing him.

  'Just schtick with me, kid,' he said, Bogartesque, and winked. His wine expertise wasn't impressing Vickie as it had Sarah, he thought. 'My boss at Los Alamos,' he went on, 'was a devout enologist or, as you might put it, a first-class wine snob. He discovered that I have a very discriminating palate, and he helped me to educate it. If you want the unclothed truth, there isn't a whole lot else to do in Los Alamos. My taste buds are now well calibrated. You should see me in action at a blind tasting. My great-grandfather was supposedly a wine merchant and importer, so perhaps it's genetic.

  'And it has proved to be a valuable skill since I came here. On Wednesdays I'm teaching the Ernsts about good wines, and they're keeping me well fed.' Might be fun to introduce Vickie to wine snobdom too, he thought.

  'Paul is nice,' said Vickie, watching a passing boat. 'I like him very much. We're fortunate that he's willing to work with us on understanding our experiment. And he's so enthusiastic.'

  'Yeah,' said David, 'Paul's been a good friend ever since I came to the department, but up to now it's been strictly outdoorsy or social things. I had no idea that I'd ever be working on something that connects with his brand of way-out particle theory. It had somehow never occurred to me that those guys were actually interested in experimental work. But it's clear that Paul is. You know, he thinks I goofed by not telling Allan that he knows about our results.'

  'He doesn't have to work with Allan,' Vickie said. 'We'd just gotten him calmed down when the subject of secrecy came up. He'd have blown up all over again. And that reminds me, David, what was his reaction to the bugging business?'

  David sighed. He didn't want to spoil their evening together with the subject of Allan Saxon and his temper tantrums, but this was something she needed to know. He described to Vickie his encounter with Saxon that afternoon. 'He said he's going to move our experiment to his company lab in Bellevue so that it'll be "better protected." ' David stopped abruptly, trying to control his anger.

  Vickie looked upset. That's awful, David. Can he do that?'

  'I told him that I wasn't going to help in doing anything of the kind. I said I was employed by the university, not by his company. I said I'd quit before I'd allow our experiment to be moved. It was about then that he ordered me out of his office. But I think maybe he'll come around when he's cooled down and has a chance to think about it.' David considered that. He wished he were more certain that Allan could be convinced.

  'David! Would you actually quit?' Vickie's voice sounded higher in pitch.

  'Damn right I would,' said David. 'I hadn't told you or Allan yet, Vickie, but a few weeks ago I got a good job offer from Cal-Berkeley for a tenure-track assistant professor position, starting in September of next year. We're still negotiating over details like salary, start-up money, and teaching load. I haven't accepted yet, but it's one of the best departments in the country. I think I could easily arrange to go there earlier than September.' David noticed that Vickie was growing visibly more upset. He paused, searching for what to say next.

  'I'd feel like a louse, though, leaving when your thesis project is only half done,' he hurried on, 'and with you getting little or no help from Allan.'

  'I couldn't stand in the way of an opportunity like that, David,' she said, frowning.

  'But what Allan wants to do is simply unacceptable,' he continued. 'I'm seriously thinking of leaving this place. Look, Vickie, if it comes to that, why don't you come with me to Berkeley?'

  'David?' said Vickie, wide-eyed. 'What are you suggesting?'

  David stopped short, considering how that had sounded. He himself was more than a little confused by what he had just said, by what he really wanted. 'My intentions are honorable, ma'am,' he mugged, trying to regain his balance. 'Or mostly honorable,' he added with a crooked grin. 'I'll bet I can get you graduate status there so you can finish your thesis doing a proper investigation of the twistor effect. It's our discovery, and Allan's trying to run away with it. But Allan doesn't understand half of our tricks with the field coils. He couldn't reproduce the work without us, not if he had to start from scratch.' The thought of going to Berkeley and leaving Vickie here suddenly wasn't acceptable.

  She shook her head. 'David, look, I've invested over three years in graduate school here. I've made good grades in the courses, I passed the qualifying exam on the first try, and in another year, or maybe two, I should have my Ph.D. I can't just pick up and leave. I'd have to start all over again.' Her lower lip trembled.

  'OK, I know it's complicated,' said David. 'But it's not impossible. On Monday I'll find out what is possible. Maybe it's not as hard to switch schools as you think. There are waivers and special permissions and things. But here's the worst part. I'm not sure that you can finish your thesis here if Allan hauls our equipment away. Just before he threw me out of his office, I asked him what would happen to your thesis project if he did decide to move th
e equipment. He said something about maybe finding you a new project. I'm afraid that he's not going to let valuable hardware be used for a mere thesis. Not if there's big money to be made with it. Look, there has to be a way—'

  'Shit!' said Vickie, taking a gulp of her wine.

  The formally clad waiter, arriving with their poached salmon with hollandaise sauce and wild rice, looked rather offended.

  David felt better after the excellent meal. He sipped the last of his Gewürztraminer and looked speculatively at Vickie as he considered the shape of the evening. He'd turned on the old Harrison charm and she was more relaxed now, in the glow of the fading sunset silhouetting the Olympics. Perhaps a stroll on the beach, a nightcap at his apartment, and who knows . . . Their eyes met. 'It's still warm enough for a walk on the beach down at Golden Gardens,' he said. 'Would you like that?'

  She considered him for a moment over her wineglass. 'David,' she said at last, 'I'd love that, but I have a problem. I mean, another problem besides Allan. My brother is up to something, and I have to watch him very closely. The judge in California told him to stay strictly away from computers. But last night I caught him using my account on the Physics HyperVAX, and doing . . . dangerous things. When we were leaving tonight, I had the distinct feeling that he wanted me out of the house because he's up to something again. I have to go home to check on him soon . . . I'm afraid I'm not very good company when I'm worrying about William.'

  David covered his disappointment. 'Sure, Vickie,' he said, cocking his head to one side. 'It would be good for me to turn in early for a change anyhow. We've been working pretty hard lately. Another time when we're not so tired, OK?'