Hidden Variables

by Charles Sheffield

  "A couple of times Ginny was at the lab at lunch time, and she and Dieter went off to eat lunch together. They were circumspect enough, but Ginny was looking different these days. It's hard to say how, but she seemed kind of sleeker when she was with Mahler, and I almost expected her to rub up against his shoulder and purr.

  "I felt sorry for Vic Lakman. He was working harder than ever, juggling his finances to squeeze out cash that he needed for the experiments, and all the time his wife was playing games behind his back. But he must have been a lot more aware of what was going on than I gave him credit for. Late one afternoon, when he was in the back room with Mahler, a fellow in a tweed jacket stopped by with a sealed envelope for him. He wouldn't leave it with me until Lakman called through from inside to tell him that it would be all right, and that he would pick it up in just a few minutes.

  "Before Lakman came out, Ginny showed up. She was pale, and her hair was a mess—very unusual for her.

  " 'Is someone in there with Dr. Mahler?' she asked.

  " 'Mr. Lakman. Go on in, I'm sure they won't mind,' I said.

  "She turned paler than ever. 'No, it's all right,' she said, then she turned and ran out.

  " ' I said that she was pale, but she was nowhere as pale as Vic Lakman when he opened that envelope and read what was inside it. He crumpled the message and thrust it into his pocket as Mahler followed him out of the back room.

  "Dieter seemed blind to Lakman's mood. He was bubbling over with excitement and high spirits.

  " 'Tomorrow I'll be able to show you the whole thing on a larger scale,' he said. 'But I think you'll agree after that demonstration that we are there. How much did I say we had, five hundred and forty grams? I ought to make a note of that.'

  "He pulled out a thin blue notebook, wallet size, opened it and scribbled something in it with an old-fashioned ink fountain pen. Then he turned to Lakman. 'Would you care to have a drink to celebrate?'

  "I could hardly stand to look at Lakman's face, but Mahler didn't seem to notice anything. After a few seconds he repeated his question.

  " 'No,' said Lakman at last. 'I'm not in the mood for that.' And he hurried off out without another word, leaving Mahler to puff on his reeking cigar and talk me—without too much trouble—into going over to a bar and having a few bourbons. Most of his mannerisms were European, but his time in the south had taught him a proper respect for good U.S. liquor."

  Jack stopped talking and picked up his cards. He frowned at his hand, then looked over to Rich, who was keeping the scores. "How am I doing?"

  "You're in last place with eighty-three. Followed by me and Dave with seventy-eight."

  "And I'm leading with thirty-eight," said George happily. "No wonder you fall behind, Jack, when you talk so much."

  Jack looked at him calmly. "Aye, that's probably true," he said, and passed three cards on to Rich.

  "But what about Mahler and the Lakmans?" I said. I didn't know about George, but I wanted to hear the rest of it. The others muttered agreement with me.

  Jack shrugged. "There's not too much more to tell. I left Mahler and went back to my apartment about nine o 'clock. Next morning, Vic Lakman came in to the lab about eight-thirty. He looked terrible, as though he hadn't slept a wink. Usually he was all business, but that morning he just seemed to want to sit around and chat to me. I thought to myself, poor bastard, he can't even think straight with what she's doing to him, and we chatted all morning about everything under the sun. I couldn't get my work done, either, but he was the boss and if he wanted to pay me to talk to him that was his option.

  "We went and had lunch together, and we were still eating when the police arrived. Dieter Mahler was dead. He had been found by Ginny Lakman about noon, when she went down to the beach house for her morning swim—or whatever it was she enjoyed there when Dieter was alive.

  "Mahler's head had been bashed in. According to the police surgeon, he had been dead only an hour or so when Ginny found him.

  "They ruled her out early. First, she had almost collapsed when she found the body, and second, the police surgeon did not believe that any woman could have delivered the blow that killed Mahler. He had been hit so hard that his cervical vertebrae had been crushed as his head was driven downwards.

  "Vic was ruled out, too, as soon as the police found he had been with me for the whole morning. I could swear to that, and anyway to leave the rear part of the lab we would have had to pass through three rooms full of people, plus a receptionist. After half an hour of answering questions about Mahler, and what he knew of his past, Vic was allowed to go home. He went to their house, where Ginny had been taken under sedation. I don't know what they said to each other there."

  Jack paused to play a card. He seemed in no hurry to say more. I slapped down a card of the same suit and said, "Come on, that can't be the end of it! What happened next? You said you were almost a millionaire, but all you've told us about is an unsolved murder."

  Rich was nodding agreement. "Give," he said—a moderately long speech for him so late in the evening.

  Jack shrugged. "Well, that was the end of Mahler's experiments. Lakman never mentioned one word about super-slippery water to anyone else. I would have accepted the police verdict—Mahler's death was the act of some vagrant looking to rob him—if it hadn't been for a couple of odd reports.

  "The first was the official description of Mahler's death. It had come while he was actually in the outside shower. They never did find the murder weapon, but the police said they were looking for the traditional 'blunt instrument', some kind of massive, padded club. The second thing was Mahler's blue notebook. The police had brought it back to the lab for identification. It had been found about thirty feet from the body, but they didn't seem to attach any significance to that.

  "When I realized what must have happened, I went out to the beach house myself and had a good look round there. I found what I expected—but it wasn't evidence that you could ever offer in court."

  Now we were all looking at Jack, with our mouths more or less gaping open.

  "Come on, then," said George at last. "Don't leave us hanging. What had happened to Mahler?"

  Jack played another card casually before he answered. "Just what you should have deduced, the way that I deduced it. I told you, Mahler was making super-slippery water—and he had succeeded. He had five hundred and forty grams of the additive, made the day before he was murdered. Enough to treat a couple of thousand gallons of water. It was locked in the lab, and that was off limits—but not to Vic Lakman. He had access to everything. And he'd seen a demonstration the same day as he was given real proof as to what Ginny and Mahler were up to.

  "He wasn't a man to stand for that. Where he grew up, adultery was probably considered justifiable homicide. Mahler had to die."

  "But you said Lakman had a perfect alibi," protested Dave. "You gave him one yourself."

  "Of course I did." Jack picked up another trick and led a high club. "He arranged it so he'd have a perfect alibi. Isn't it obvious what he did? He went to the lab that night, took the sample of super-slippery water additive out of the lab, and went to the beach house. While Mahler was sleeping, he climbed up to the roof of the house and dumped the additive in the water tank, the rain-fed one that supplied the outside shower. The additive made the water flow a hundred times as easily—maybe a thousand times as easily, if Mahler's estimate was correct.

  "Next morning, Mahler took his usual swim, then went into the outside shower and turned it on. A couple of hundred gallons of water—well over half a ton—came out of the shower head in a couple of seconds. It smashed Mahler, just as though a sixteen-hundred pound weight had been dropped down on him from ten feet up. That was the police's 'blunt instrument'—no wonder they never found it."

  "But I still don't understand," said Dave. "You said that you found evidence. Why didn't you take it back and show it to the police?"

  "I told you, it wasn't the sort of thing they would accept," said Jack gently. "I found
what I thought I would find—the faucet of the outside shower still turned on, as it was at the moment when Mahler died. And all around the shower, forty feet in all directions, the marks of a big splash in the sand. A few hundred gallons hitting all at once makes a big spread, much bigger than you'd ever get from the same amount coming down in a slow trickle. I thought that's what I'd see, when I first had the chance for a good look at this. Remember, the police found it thirty feet from the shower."

  He pulled a thin blue notebook from his pocket, wallet size, and handed it to me. I opened it and stared at the pages.

  "What's it say?" asked George.

  I shook my head. "I don't know. It's unreadable, all you can see is a lot of runny blurs. This could say anything at all."

  "Aye, true enough," said Jack. He sighed. "That was Mahler's notebook, the one where he kept the details of all his experiments. It was over near the air mattress, where he'd left it when he went in for a swim. When the super-water smashed him, the book got thoroughly soaked by the splash, even though it was thirty feet away. It's a great pity, but as I told you Mahler's notes were all kept in ink. It ran so much that I've only been able to make out odd words of it, here and there. But if I ever do decipher it, the whole thing, I'll know Mahler's secret of slippery water, and that will make me rich. I can't see Vic Lakman ever talking about it, or working on it again."

  "Hold on," said George suddenly, while the rest of us were still staring at the water-run pages of the notebook. "We've not been watching what we were doing here, and Jack has taken all the tricks so far. If we don't watch out he'll take the lot."

  "Too late, I'm afraid," said Jack quietly. He laid the rest of his cards, face up, on the table. "I think you'll find these are winning cards for the last three tricks. Let's see, shooting the sun like this takes my score down by fifty-two points, right? I think that puts me nicely in the lead, just ahead of George."

  He stood up and picked up the blue notebook, weighing it in his hand and looking at it thoughtfully.

  "Aye. Might be a good time for me to call it a day, and maybe have one more look at this before I turn in. Drive carefully, all of you, and I'll see you all next week."

  He turned back for a second in the doorway. "Aye, and don't any of you take chances when you're in the shower. After all, you never know when some smart man will re-discover Mahler's invention."

  AFTERWORD: THE SOFTEST HAMMER.

  The "slippery water" described in this story is real enough. It's made by adding a polyethylene oxide polymer to ordinary water to reduce the viscosity, and that allows more water to flow through a hose—not a thousand times more, but perhaps twice as much.

  The writers' group is real, too. It's called the Vicious Circle, a moveable feast where every Wednesday night George Andrews, Peter Altermann, Dave Bischoff, Ted White, Steve Brown, Paul Halpine, Rich Brown and other regulars meet to read and comment on each other's stories. Criticism is severe—we argue that encouragement and stroking are readily available from family and friends. What we aim to do is to make any subsequent disparaging comments from editors and reviewers seem mild by comparison.

  When I first wrote this story I had the whole writers' group in there, but I was forced to omit some people when I sent it out for submission to a magazine. No reader could be expected to keep track of a dozen different characters in a story of less than five thousand words.

  I was going to apologize here to those who have been left out of the published version. After some thought, I have decided that my apologies must go to those who were left in.

  HIDDEN VARIABLE

  The beginning of the Scorpio meteor shower was estimated for 19.00 hours. Already there had been a couple of bright flares far below in the Earth's atmosphere, as early members of the shower signalled their arrival.

  Jose Perona had trained the big scope downwards, turning it from its usual work of planetary observation. From the synchronous station, twenty-two thousand miles above the equator, he could easily see the lights of Quito, geometrical patterns of white points beneath them. After a few minutes he grunted and turned to his companion.

  "What do you think, Mackie? That's the fourth meteor I've seen burn up in two minutes down there."

  Mack Johnson glanced over at the wall display. He frowned. "Still over an hour to go, if that 19.00 hour estimate is any good. Where did it come from?"

  Jose had pushed himself lightly from his seat by the telescope and floated over to the computer console. He made a rapid data entry and looked at the display console before he replied.

  "Pretty old data. The Scorpio's are a long-period group—ninety years since they were here. I bet we're seeing some spreading in elements, even though Outer Station has been tracking them for a month now. We'd better assume we'll need the screens up early."

  Mack Johnson sighed. "That's going to make us unpopular, I know for a fact that Lustig has an X-ray observation going that he'd like to hold for another two hours. All right, better safe than sorry."

  He picked up the phone and accessed public address. "Attention, all personnel. The Scorpio shower seems to be here early. The Wenziger screens will be switched on five minutes from now. Repeat. The Wenziger screens will be switched on in five minutes. Secure all external materials and prepare for communication blackout."

  He disconnected and grimaced. "I give us thirty seconds, Jose, then listen to the complaints come in. I bet that interrupts a hundred experiments up here."

  Even as he spoke, the phone had begun to buzz angrily. He ignored it and coded in an Earth-link circuit. The Quito station cut in at once. They could see the com technician turning back from the window to face their communicator screen.

  "Been expecting you," he said. "I've been watching the shower start—it's early, right?"

  "Looks like it." Mack nodded. "We'll be cutting in the Wenziger's in about four minutes. The shower is supposed to last about fourteen hours. We'll talk to you again when we're shielded by Earth—six and a half hours from now, maybe a little more. Anything need saying that can't wait?"

  The technician shook his head. "I have a pile of messages, nothing urgent. Talk to you again when you switch off the Wenziger's."

  They cut the connection and began the final count-down and turned on the Wenziger screen. Everything went dead on the display, instantly. Mack leaned back in his seat and looked again at the phone. The complainers had all given up their efforts to reach him.

  "Ever wonder what would happen if the Universe were to end while we've got the Wenziger's on?" he said. "Think we'd know about it?"

  Jose shrugged. "Not until we came back out again. Nothing gets through, if the theory's right. Perlman tried a neutrino detection experiment a couple of years ago, and he thought a couple of those were penetrating the screen, but he couldn't get the same result when he tried it again." He switched off the dead displays. "Won't need these 'til we come out again. You know, there's a funny thing about these Wenziger screens."

  Mack was running through all the input receiver systems. There was nothing but thermal noise on any of them.

  "Funny thing?" He turned back to face Perona. "The whole idea of the screen's funny to me. I had years of the theory in school, and I still don't understand any of it. Just be thankful we have 'em, that's all—we'd have fried in that last solar flare without 'em."

  "Yeah. Sure. I don't know how they work, either. But there's still something funny about them," Jose persisted. "They have the wrong name."

  "Wenziger? What's wrong with that?"

  They had settled back in their seats, secure in the knowledge that there would be—could be—no incoming or outgoing signal until the screens were switched off.

  "Back when we had the theory, back when I was in school, we had to do a paper on the screens." Jose shrugged. "I was keen in those days. I went back to the original reference papers. Couldn't understand them, but I'll tell you one thing. None of those original papers was by Wenziger. Not one."

  Mack was frowning, running his
fingers over the channel selectors. "That's dumb. You must have missed something. I think I even remember reading papers by Wenziger in my physics course—long time ago, now, but I remember the name."

  "Yeah, Wenziger was a physicist. But all the papers with the theory in them were by Nissom."

  "Laurance Nissom?"

  "How many others do you know?"

  "None. But if that's true, why are they always called the Wenziger screens?"

  Jose Perona was smiling smugly. "My question, let me point out. I told you there was something funny about the Wenziger's. All right then, Mackie, stop fiddling with those keys and listen. I'll tell you how they got their name—even a lump like you ought to know this one. Nissom named 'em that . . ."

  * * *

  It was dark when he reached the wall; pitch-dark, moonless, with stars hidden by a heavy overcast. He squatted down and felt carefully for his first marker, a sticky blob of resin dabbed on the smooth stone surface. He felt his way down from the resin patch to the groove at the base of the wall, then traced a line outward to the small pebble of his second marker.

  The darkness was complete. Everything had to be done by touch, by carefully rehearsed and precise movement. Slowly, carefully, measuring a line down past his braced fingers, he pushed the length of sharpened piano wire into the soft soil beneath the pebble.

  After five time-consuming failures, he on the sixth attempt felt a faint pulse returned along the stiff wire. He had struck the coaxial cable that took the signals from the eyes on the top of the wall back to the house.

  He straightened up, breathed deeply, and carefully brushed the loose earth from the knees of his trousers. The high wall, invisible, loomed beside him. He knew its exact height and the shape of the concave overhang that led to its top. The surface, cold in the summer night, felt smooth and seamless to his outstretched hand.

  He placed his back square to the wall to give him direction, then using the lights of the distant house as a second guide he walked ten measured paces away from the wall. He bent forward. Plunging his hands through the upper branches of an azalea bush, he felt his way down to the cache hidden at its base. One by one, he pulled objects out from it and carried them back to the base of the wall.