Days of Atonement

by Walter Jon Williams

  “You have to talk to him on his level, though,” Steffens added, “and his level is pretty high. He’s friendly, but the quality of his thought is kind of intimidating.”

  “He’s brilliant,” Kurita said. “He and Singh are right at the top. Even Dielh talks to him.”

  “Doesn’t look like Dielh’s going to talk to me,” Loren said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Steffens said. “Joe Dielh is working hard on getting his Nobel, and he’s not dealing with anyone who can’t help him.”

  “He’ll never get it on his own,” explained Kurita, “so he’s harnessed Tim and Singh to get it for him. That’s why he doesn’t do any research on the classified side— he couldn’t publish and get himself invited to Stockholm.”

  “He doesn’t?” Loren was startled.

  “No. The military offered him a lot, but he’s always turned them down.”

  “I’ve been told he’s in Washington on a classified mission.”

  Steffens and Kurita looked at each other, their puzzlement plain. Kurita was the first to speak.

  “First we’ve heard of it.”

  “Think for a minute.” A pain shot through Loren’s back and he hitched his gun around, straightened one leg, stretched the muscles. “Did anything unusual happen on Friday or Saturday? Anything out of the ordinary.”

  “There were a lot of people in and out,” Steffens said. “I didn’t know very many of them. I had to replace a malfunctioning calorimeter on the detector array, but that was last Thursday night, before anything started. And then Friday night I had to fix a ventilator in the conference room, where the buffet was set up.” He shrugged. “That’s all I can remember.”

  “I can’t remember anything unusual other than the large numbers of people,” said Kurita.

  “Can I see the accelerators?” Loren asked.

  Steffens looked uncertain. “You can, I guess.”

  “They’re miles from here, is what he means,” Kurita said. “This is just the control room. The accelerators themselves are way out on the mesa.”

  “There’s not much to see,” said Steffens. “Other than the proton synchrotrons and the small storage rings, there’s mostly just a long tunnel with a pipe in it.”

  Loren stretched his leg again, pain nagging at him. “Why isn’t the control room near where the collision takes place?”

  “We’ve got a lot of electronics in here,” said Kurita. “It could interfere with the experiments. So the LINAC is way out on the ranch, and we control it by fiberoptic cables to minimize interference.”

  Loren glanced around as he tried to think of another question, taking in the bright monitors, the workstations, the balcony from which supervisors could observe their underlings. It looked more like a motion picture set than anything real, and the objects the room was built to study seemed more unreal even than a movie.

  “Wanna see the Cray that runs the show?” said Steffens. “It’s impressive.”

  Loren took his Xeroxes and followed the two back to the upper level and then out of the room. A few bearded men in jeans and T-shirts passed by in the corridors and offered greetings to his guides. Another barnlike room, this one brightly lit and filled with desks, niches, and terminals, offered as its centerpiece the Cray, which was a twelve-foot-high clear-plastic tetrahedron largely filled with a black-as-midnight carbon solid on which bas-relief circuitry could dimly be seen. Other techs stood by like proud new fathers showing off their offspring. Someone had stuck a piece of cardboard on the Cray’s base, with an arrow pointing upward to the computer, that featured in red crayon the words Heisenberg Sleeps HERE.

  “The whole structure’s filled with cryogenic fluid,” Kurita said. “That’s the only way you can cool circuitry this fast.”

  Loren was surprised by the tall transparent tubes that arched above the computer, also filled with clear coolant. “Makes your computer look like a McDonald’s,” he said.

  “Fast data, not fast food,” said one of the techs.

  “It got knocked out by a fast-moving electron Friday morning,” Steffens offered.

  Loren looked at him. “I heard there were computer problems.”

  “See, the whole universe is full of electrons that we can’t see. Besides the ones in matter, I mean. That’s Dirac’s idea.”

  Maybe Dirac, Loren thought, was on the log sheets somewhere.

  “And sometimes an electron jumps out of this invisible sea and interacts with matter. It happens about once each week in the Cray. And crash goes the computer.” Steffens grinned. “Interesting, hey? That we can build a computer so sensitive that it can be knocked out by something invisible?”

  “I guess. Do I really need to know this?”

  Steffens looked sympathetic. “Probably not.”

  Loren’s tour continued, to Steffens’s workshop, full of half-assembled equipment and crumpled potato chip bags, and another big room, filled with tables and benches and vending machines, where the buffet had been set up during the run. As they walked, Kurita kept on trying to convince Steffens of the value of creating their own universe.

  “What happens,” Loren asked, “to our universe when you create your own?”

  “We get blown away,” said Steffens.

  “No offense,” said Loren, “but I hope your experiment fails.”

  “Wait!” Kurita said. “Not necessarily!” He looked confidingly at Loren. “That’s why I need my colleague here. He’s the expert on Kaluza-Klein theory.”

  Steffens scowled. “What’s that got to do with it?”

  “You just arrange for different dimensions to collapse, see,” Kurita said. “You’ve got nine spacial and two temporal dimensions to work with, right? And ours are collapsed to four. So when you create the new universe, you arrange so that it collapsed into another set of spacial dimensions and the second time dimension. And then the new universe won’t interfere with ours.”

  “I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Steffens. “How do you make these arrangements?”

  “That’s what I need you for,” said Kurita. “You’re the expert.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They found William Patience in an office near the entrance. He was talking on the phone, looked up as he saw them in the hallway, nodded and waved, then went back to his business. Loren tried to eavesdrop, but the conversation didn’t seem relevant— something to do with Patience straightening out someone’s overtime. The man’s intensity gave the impression he was saving his employee from the electric chair. Outside in the corridor, Steffens and Kurita kept up their act.

  Patience hung up. “Seen everything?” he said.

  “I guess,” Loren said.

  “Take you to the train?”

  “Sure.”

  Loren shook hands with Steffens and Kurita and thanked them, then followed Patience out into the parking lot. The sunlight was blinding. The parking lot was dry and there was no sign of the downpour only a few hours ago. Loren put on his shades.

  Patience got in the Blazer and started it. “What did you think?”

  “Those two guys should be wearing greasepaint and putty noses.”

  “They’re just techs. You should see the damn scientists.” Patience backed out of his place, swung out of the lot. “I remember one of them asked me to repair his stapler once. His Swingline was broken, and I happened to be passing, and he wandered out of his office and asked if I could fix it for him.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder who’s in charge of the asylum.”

  There should be humor in that, Loren thought, but somehow there wasn’t. Loren had the feeling that what Patience really meant was that he should be in charge, and that if he were, changes would definitely be made. Not least of all to the staplers.

  Loren wondered if he should try to see Jernigan again, then decided against it. He’d try to corner Jernigan without either of his watchdogs, Patience or his wife.

  “Did you see Vlasic on the maglev?”

  “There was nobody.”
r />   “It hardly ever gets used,” shifting into third. “A pity, since the technology’s so nice.”

  “Yeah. People love their cars too much.”

  “I guess some of the maintenance staff use it.”

  “Yeah. The peons from town.”

  Patience gave him an odd look.

  “This Vlasic,” he went on, “he’s a theoretician of some sort. Came over a long time ago from Eastern Europe. And he likes to ride the train. Back and forth, all day sometimes, if he’s working on a tough problem. He sits right up front in a coat and tie and watches the world go by. It says it helps him visualize how things move at relativistic speeds.”

  “I didn’t see him.”

  The Blazer moved past Discovered Symmetries and toward the station. Loren handed in his visitor badge and shook hands with Patience.

  The maglev was waiting. Loren got in the front compartment and saw that he was sharing it with someone. Sitting right up front was a small, bald, pink-faced man in a neat blue three-piece suit, complete with red tie. He was sitting hunched slightly forward, folded hands in his lap, like a contrite schoolboy. When Loren entered he glanced over his shoulder with watery blue eyes.

  Loren nodded at him as he sat across the aisle. The man, Vlasic presumably, nodded back, then returned his abstracted gaze to the front.

  Loren thought about the Xeroxes, the data he’d gathered from Patience’s files. All probably useless, unless Patience had let something slip, and that was unlikely.

  He’d have to think of something else to do.

  The train rose, humming, and began its fast ride into a former century.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “So I called Violet Dudenhof,” Loren said, later.

  “Did you?” Debra dried lettuce with several paper towels. A laxative commercial boomed from the television in the next room.

  “I was tactful.” Defensively. “And Jesus, Randal died decades ago. She should have got over any shyness about his behavior by now. So I asked her if Randal had any relatives left in New Mexico, any in that particular age group—”

  “That is tactful. I guess.”

  “And she said no. No relatives at all that she knows of, not since his brother died of AIDS in San Francisco. And he was gay.”

  “That doesn’t mean he couldn’t have had a kid twenty-odd years ago.” Debra opened the door of the microwave oven and brought out a bubbling enchilada casserole.

  Loren thought about it. The thought of someone who changed sexual orientation was not a comfortable one for him. A man should discover what worked for him, he figured, then stick to it.

  “I suppose not,” he said.

  “But still. No one’s heard anything.”

  “No. But I’ll keep asking.”

  “I wonder,” an idea striking him, “if Patience is gay.”

  “Did he give you that impression?”

  “He’s got more machismo than all the Magnificent Seven put together. But that could be overcompensation. And the Turkish carpets, the long hair, the . . .” He groped for concepts. “The gun fetish. The clothes fetish. He’s never been married. Maybe John Doe is a lover he’s bumped off.”

  “Sally Manson told me that he asked her out.”

  “Did he?” He looked at her. “Did she say yes?”

  “She went out with him a couple times. But all the machismo and narcissism put her off.”

  “Narcissism! That’s the word I was looking for.” He sighed. “I’ll keep asking around.”

  Keep asking around. That was his strategy now. Sooner or later he’d be able to find someone— someone besides a ten-year-old, anyway— who could provide some useful evidence.

  “Right now I’m going to start looking into the wife,” he said.

  “Jernigan’s.” Following his jump in subject.

  “I got her file from Patience, but I haven’t looked at it yet.”

  “So you think he’s connected with the murder.”

  “I think he knows more than he’s telling.” Loren frowned at the thick bubbles rising in the casserole. The scent of onions and green chiles sharpened in the room. “I hate to think he’s connected with the killing in any way,” he said.

  As if on cue, the sound of weapons fire came from the television. Small, hollow-sounding bursts, not dramatic enough to be fictional. The nightly news had started.

  “There were two people shooting at your John Doe,” Debra said.

  “Two people with identical weapons. Like the two guys who travel in each ATL jeep. Or who guard the gate.”

  “Except the caliber’s wrong.”

  “And the caliber’s weird. Hardly anyone around here uses .41. The .41 Action Express was intended for law enforcement, and was introduced around the same time as ten millimeter and .40 caliber, but for some reason it never caught on.”

  Debra removed the pot of Spanish rice from the stove and stirred it. She left the spoon in the pot. Loren got a pair of plates from the cupboard.

  Katrina and Kelly were with Skywalker tonight, leaving their parents to dine alone on leftover casserole. Loren and Debra took their meals into the living room, the sound of gunfire growing louder, and sat in front of the television. Debra reached for the remote control and turned down the volume. The announcer was describing the civil war in Natal. Chile sauce scored Loren’s palate as the camera panned over flyblown corpses scattered in a minefield. LIVE BY SATELLITE, said the small letters in a corner of the screen.

  “Are you going to be costuming tonight?” he asked.

  “Yes. We’re getting close to the deadline and I still have half the chorus to fit.”

  “Is Sondra Jernigan in the play?”

  Debra looked away from the TV, her eyes interested. “Yes,” she said. “In the chorus.”

  “And the chorus is rehearsing tonight?”

  Debra nodded.

  Mortars walked up and down the televised veldt. The camera jerked as its operator sought cover. “Good chile,” Loren said.

  “Fresh from Hatch.”

  The Lord, he thought, was providing.

  That night he drove Debra’s Taurus, a less conspicuous flag to corporate goons. No one answered the door at Jernigan’s, and neither of the cars was present in the driveway. Loren occupied his time by going up and down the block, knocking on doors, finding people who had been away yesterday and asking the same questions he’d asked then. He heard nothing new.

  He walked away from the last query, hearing a carved oak door close solidly behind him. He halted at the sidewalk, where an elaborate wrought-iron grid, reminiscent in its way of Discovered Symmetries, held aloft a mailbox; and he let Vista Linda rise to his senses. Water still sprayed here and there over the mossy, expensive lawns; lawn mowers still roared in the background. A preadolescent boy sped by on a moped, a red strip of fluorescent tape on the back of his helmet. Somewhere a car with a broken muffler rumbled. There was a brisk October coolness adrift in the darkening sky and Loren turned the collar of his jacket up.

  He stood silently and let the time and place wash over him. God talking, maybe.

  A tall silhouette was moving up the street and it was some moments before Loren realized it was Jernigan. He’d never seen an adult walking anywhere in this suburb: there was no place to walk to. Except, of course, the maglev station, which Jernigan would naturally use while his car was being fixed. Loren steered an interception course, crossing the street. Jernigan recognized him and quickened his pace.

  “Hi, Dr. Jernigan.”

  Jernigan kept his long legs moving, his gaze fixed resolutely on the haven of his own front door. He was swinging a narrow leatherette case on the end of one arm. “I don’t have to talk to you,” he said.

  Loren had to adopt a shuffling, skipping pace to keep up to the tall man, just like the woman guard had adopted with Loren that afternoon. Concrete scuffed under his shoes as he hopped along. “I just want to tell you some stuff.” A bit breathlessly. “For your own good.”

  “I’m not
interested.”

  “I wanted to give you the name of a good lawyer. Since you’re going to need one.”

  Jernigan just gave him a look over his shoulder, a look of contempt.

  “See, I’ve been talking to witnesses. I told you that I would. I found someone who said you didn’t drive home Saturday night. And that, combined with what the dead man said before he died . . .”

  Jernigan kept moving, but the movement turned jerky, spastic almost, as if his brain weren’t sending out quite the right signals. He gave a Quasimodo lurch into the blood-colored lava gravel of his rock garden, taking a more direct line for his front door.

  “Listen to me,” Loren said, feet crunching on gravel as he skipped alongside. “I think you’ve been getting the wrong kind of advice. I think you need to talk to a real lawyer.”

  “Leave me alone!” Jernigan shouted. He spun around, gravel spraying from his feet. Loren stepped back to avoid the case at the end of Jernigan’s thin arm.

  “Will you see a lawyer?” he said. “I don’t think you’re a killer, but you keep acting like a suspect. And I keep finding things wrong with your story.”

  “Just keep away!” Jernigan said.

  “Oliver Cantwell,” Loren said. “He’s a good attorney, and he’s just a phone call away.”

  Jernigan stared at him. Loren could see the pulse hammering in his throat.

  “I have to go in now,” Jernigan said. His voice was conversational. “I have a teleconference with Dr. Dielh.”

  “Oliver Cantwell,” Loren repeated. “Remember the name.”

  Jernigan nodded, then turned around and walked from the rock garden across the driveway toward his house. Bloodred gravel dribbled down the driveway, trailing from his loafers. Loren regarded him for a long moment, then turned and headed back into the growing night.

  Time to knock on more doors.

  Before he was through there was a presence on the street, the dark, waiting, expected silhouette of an ATL jeep. Loren ignored it as he went on knocking on doors, asking questions. Kept on knocking till it was full dark.