“Says here on your license you’re Gerald Meier from Cambridge, Massachusetts.”
“Right. Keep looking.”
Dacey held up an identification card. “It says you’re with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.”
“Yes. I’m an astrophysicist. A theoretical astrophysicist.”
Dacey hmphed sarcastically. “That’s the only kind, isn’t it? Like, you could do experiments with stars, eh?”
Gerald took the comment to mean his identity was accepted and he could roll over. He shook his hair back from his face and stared up at Dacey with dark, questioning eyes. Nancy backed up and looked dubiously at Dacey, who gestured that the movement was allowed.
“Why don’t you let me explain? Take these off.”
“Not quite yet, but we’ll get you a bit more comfortable.” Dacey nodded at Nancy, who stuffed the pistol in the waistband of her shorts and helped hoist Gerald to his feet. Dacey yanked at the cuff, checking that his hands were still bound firmly behind him.
“What are these things?” Gerald twisted to try to see his hands.
“Plastic zip tie. Makes a good handcuff. I keep a few pair handy in case of people like you. Girl can’t be too careful.”
“Hmm,” said Nancy, eyeing the cuffs. “Could I borrow some for Sammy?” Dacey laughed as the two women helped Gerald over to the steps leading to Dacey’s townhouse and sat him down on the second step.
“Can we talk privately?” the man asked.
Dacey considered the request. “Nance, I think we’re okay here,” she said. “Go make sure Sammy’s not up to something. I’ll holler if I need you.” Nancy offered the pistol, but Dacey declined, so she walked away, still eyeing Gerald suspiciously. The man shook his hair out of his eyes and breathed deeply.
“Look, let me give you a number to call. It’s Norm Mankiewitz, the chair of my department. His home number. He’ll vouch for me.” Dacey paused, then nodded as Gerald recited a number. She stood up, looking suspiciously down at him.
“Well, I guess you won’t get into mischief with your hands tied behind you.” She pulled a cell phone from her pocket, unlocked her door and went into her townhouse, leaving the door open so she could watch him. Gerald shifted himself to get more comfortable, leaning against the wrought-iron railing on the steps. He heard the murmur of Dacey’s conversation, as she apparently had reached Mankiewitz. He looked around. It was a nice street, a nice townhouse. A middle-aged woman walked by with a small white dog on a leash. She eyed him suspiciously. He couldn’t conceal that his hands were tied behind him, so he tried to look nonchalant, stretching his legs out and crossing his ankles. He managed a smile and a nod, but she didn’t return the smile, shaking her head in a way that said she expected as much from the young woman who lived in that townhouse. After about ten minutes and two more head-shaking neighbors, she returned with two cans of beer.
“He says you’re not a psychopath. He says you’re a pretty nice guy, actually, although you’re quiet and kind of spacey. He didn’t say spacey. He said absentminded. He said you’re a genius. He also said nobody knew where you’d gone and he was glad I’d found you. He wants you to call him.” Dacey kept to herself her own observation that Gerald was a pretty good-looking fellow.
“Well, I guess all that’s true. Will you cut me loose?”
Dacey considered the idea. “Yeah … provisionally. I want to hear a satisfactory explanation. If it’s not, I yell for Nancy and she brings her gun.” Gerald nodded and Dacey drew a small Swiss Army knife from her pocket and sliced through the strap. She set the open knife down on the porch. Gerald rubbed his wrists to erase the welts. He accepted a beer from her, opened it and took a deep swallow. His stomach still hurt badly, but the beer helped.
“Look, I’m sorry,” she said, fetching the Wendy’s bag from the back of the Range Rover. “Maybe I overreacted a bit. But you sort of moved in without warning. A girl can get a little freaked.” He said nothing, so she unwrapped the hamburger and sliced it in two, offering him half. He took it and nodded in thanks. She sat on the top step, and he twisted sideways on the bottom step, resuming the position leaning against the wrought-iron railing, and looking up at her curiously. She was not like the women he usually encountered in academe. They didn’t usually kick one in the gut. He actually admired the act, even though it would leave him sore for some time.
She extended her legs and worked her feet around to stretch her leg muscles. “I’ll be sore from all the stuff today, including that kick.” She took a bite of hamburger, and when she had swallowed it, asked, “So, if you’re not a criminal, why’d that cop call me about you?”
“Misunderstanding. I don’t come across to people very well, sometimes.” He took a bite of his own half.
“I’ll say you don’t. Okay, let’s start over, like we never had our little rumble. What do you want?”
“Help with a puzzle.” He took another bite of his hamburger and a sip of beer. His stomach was slightly queasy, but it was empty. The hamburger would help him recover.
“What kind of puzzle? Astrophysics? I don’t know anything about astrophysics. I’m a geologist.”
“Well, actually I don’t know for sure what the puzzle is. Maybe geology. Maybe unnatural. Maybe some astrophysics.”
“You’re sounding weird, Gerald,” Dacey warned.
“Sorry. Look, I should explain that, because I’m a theoretician, I just think about things. Why they happen. I can’t explain it, but I kind of sense how theories should fit together. I see concepts, visualize them. I’m sorry, I just can’t—”
“—articulate very well,” she finished his sentence. “It’s okay, I’m kinda followin’ you. I took a course in the psychology of science. Einstein was like that. And there’s Stephen Hawking. Almost intuitive.”
“Yes, intuitive. Anyway, about six months ago … well, more like a year … I became aware of lots of strange things happening. I would read in the papers or see on TV about some strange things.”
“Like what?”
“I’ve got it all on my laptop in the van. I’ll get it in a minute. You’ll see what I mean.” He was so intent on his subject, he forgot his hamburger. His gaze grew distant. “Anyway, the only way I can classify them so far is they involve things appearing and disappearing.”
“Appearing and disappearing? That’s it? That’s your big scientific theory? Boy, I’m even more sure than ever why I like rocks.”
“I know it sounds—”
“Stupid?”
“—vague. But a lot of theories start out vague.”
“Appearing and disappearing,” Dacey said again reflectively, taking a sip of beer. “Like that house. That’s why you had that article with my picture. The cops told me.” Gerald nodded. She shrugged. She was interested. “Okay, let me see your stuff.” After all, she was totally stumped by the mystery of the disappearing house. And there was the unexplained cavern. But mostly, she remembered Anita. And she remembered the woman’s daughter, little Jenny, and her confused, fearful look, not understanding where her father had gone.
Gerald rose and walked, slightly bent over with his sore stomach, around the corner and out of sight. She felt even sorrier for having kicked him. He seemed okay, she thought as she finished the half hamburger and started on the chili, rummaging around for the plastic spoon in the bag. The chili was lukewarm, but still tasty. She was halfway through the bowl and almost done with her beer when he drove up in the van and disappeared from the driver’s seat into the back. From the rocking and squeaking that emanated from the van, she could tell he was rummaging around. He appeared out the back door with his laptop. A can followed him, rolling along in the gutter. He retrieved it and pitched it into the back and shut the door, trying twice before the latch held.
She had turned on the porch light as dusk rose, and sat down on the steps just as he reached her and perched beside her, opening the laptop and launching a database program. He brought up an image of a multitude of stars, wit
h a bright streak cutting through the middle.
“This is really what got me started. They were doing a sky survey at Palomar, taking photos with this wide-field telescope. They got this shot of this really bright object out in space. Brighter than an asteroid, even brighter than a little sun. It was moving against the background of stars, so they knew it was in our solar system.” He clicked to the next picture of what looked to be about the same star field. “Then a couple of hours later, they did another exposure of the same star field. Bang! It’s gone! Disappeared!” He clicked back and forth between the two photos, showing how the streak has vanished.
“Maybe it just zoomed out of the area.”
“They could tell how fast it was going from the streak. Really damned fast. But they allowed for that.”
“It might’ve exploded.”
“Maybe, but there was no flash. Disappeared,” he said portentously. “Anyway, I don’t like things like that … things that don’t fit. It means that something’s wrong with a theory. So, I started going through astronomy data from planetary probes. And I found more objects in space that appeared or disappeared. It was tough, because they were mostly in raw data. None of the astronomers would publish them, because they all thought something was wrong with their instruments.” He brought up the next photo, a swirling mass of red, orange and yellow color with a large, dark splotch in the middle. “This did get published. It’s a closeup of Jupiter taken about a year ago. There’s this big anomaly in the atmosphere that showed up one week and was gone the next.”
“Anomaly?”
“Well, they did measurements. The atmosphere seemed to be swirling inward to a point. Like a whirlpool. But that’s all they could figure out.”
“So, what’s all that stuff up there got to do with us earth people?”
“Well, after Jupiter, I started looking in the newspapers, searching online news services. I don’t know why. Just a hunch.” He brought up a news story on the screen. “Few months ago, there was this gas cloud that killed a big reindeer herd in the Arctic circle. Something appeared just out of nowhere.” He clicked through the database and brought up another news story. “These climbers in the Caucasus mountains went on an expedition to climb this mountain and found the topography had changed. A whole big chunk of mountain had eroded. Or disappeared.”
“And now that house.”
“Yeah, that house.” His eyes were bright now. He’d forgotten the injury, forgotten the welts on his wrists, forgotten his half-eaten hamburger. “And there are explosions and eruptions and—”
“Whoa, pal!” She stood up, edging toward the door. “This is all getting too weird. I agreed to listen, but this is just too tall a story. What do you expect me to believe here?”
He stood up, too, but knew enough to back away instead of approaching her. “I don’t expect you to believe anything now. I don’t believe anything. I’ve just got this—”
“Obsession. That’s what they call it.”
“Well, all right. But I left Cambridge to go find out about these things. I’ve just got this … this obsession. All I want now is to find out what you know about this crater. Just let me look at your data.”
“Yeah, my data,” she said. “About all I’ll have is data. I’ve got no funds to continue this. The university won’t give me the kind of help to mount a major exploration of that cavern … to do isotopic analyses … seismic profiling …”
“See? See? That’s where I can help you.”
“Yeah, like you’ve got the money?” She glanced at his ratty van, with its crumpled fender and peeling paint.
“No, of course not. But there’s a foundation that supports me. It funds research that’s kind of speculative … you know, at the edge.”
“Like Bigfoot and UFOs?”
“Well, I don’t know about that, but I heard about it and put in an application, and they’re paying for me to do this stuff.”
“What’s the name?”
Gerald took a crumpled card out of his pocket and handed it to her. The card read “Deus Foundation” and had a New York address and phone number.
“Deus, like the Latin for God? They religious?”
“Well, I don’t think so. I think they meant the name to mean, like, the ultimate. The search for the ultimate.”
Dacey knew there were dozens of odd little foundations around, and that they tended to support research that wasn’t yet well-established enough to get money from the big government agencies. She stretched out her legs, wriggled her toes, looked at the card and thought a minute.
“And what’ll you do?”
“I’ll tell them your research fits in with mine. That might help when you put in a grant application. All they can do is say no.”
Dacey gave a what-the-hell shrug and put the card in her jeans pocket. “Well, maybe if this’ll get me any closer to figuring out that damned hole. But I’ve got to think about this. You go away now. Just go get in your little van and go sleep somewhere. Call me tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether I’ve decided to work with you or run you off.”
He backed away, smiling slightly beneath his beard. “Fine. That’s all I ask.” He turned and got into his van, cranked its recalcitrant engine to clattering life and drove away, leaving a slight pall of smoke over the quiet street. She waited until he was gone and retrieved the rock and the video camera from the Range Rover.
“Well?” she heard behind her. It was Nancy, the pistol still in her waistband. “I watched out the window. Was he a mugger or what?”
“He was a ‘what.’ Kind of a nut. Or maybe a genius.”
“Or a nutty genius.”
Dacey nodded, thanked Nancy for the firepower support and carried her valuable evidence into the townhouse.
Robert Langdon Balch, the second youngest-ever Senior Associate Vice President at the San Francisco investment firm Darien, Bowles and Gladstone Ltd., twiddled his Mont Blanc pen impatiently as he flipped through the corporate report. He glanced up again at the digital clock on his desk — the one he positioned in his line of sight across the walnut desk, so he could surreptitiously watch the time when he had visitors. Indeed, it did show seven o’clock. A seven and two zeroes. He’d been ready since the clock showed six-five-zero. Really ready. The corporate stock prospectus bored him, and he flipped the last page over and pitched the thick blue booklet in his to-be-filed box for the secretary. The company was a dog. No glamour. No glitz. It mass-produced some kind of electronic sensors for industrial boilers. Not an exotic biotech firm; not a balls-out aggressive software firm. Not the kind of company he could profitably pitch to his investor clients.
He decided to pass time playing with his computer. He shouldn’t need to keep on working. The clock glowed with seven-zero-five now, past time for everybody to be gone. Time for things to start happening. He pressed a few keys to check his computerized schedule. Yes, indeed, he had scheduled the appointment from seven o’clock to eight. It was a blacked-out listing on the computer network, so the other executives who looked at his schedule couldn’t see the purpose; just that the hour was blocked out. Seven until eight, then he would go home for dinner.
Bored with the computer, he swiveled his big leather chair to look out the large window at San Francisco spread out below in a vibrant clutter. The city’s lights were coming on in the slightly hazy dusk, and the buses and cars were rolling up and down the hills on their way to wherever. He caught sight of a cable car slowly making for Nob Hill. He looked over to the other buildings, to the windows about level with his twenty-third-floor office. They were almost all empty. He reminded himself that he had a good office, third one down from the president’s corner suite. Last year, his office had been fifth from the corner and hadn’t had room for the sofa and easy chair that he’d had the designer select. Before that, he’d worked on a lower floor in one of those cubicles. He congratulated himself again on his progress.
He became bored with the view and picked up the phone and punched in her number. I
t began to ring. She would tell him if everybody had left. It was probably that damned Huston holding things up. Huston sat in his little office with no room for a sofa until all hours reading all the fine print on the goddamned IPO prospectuses to find out whether some pissant little stock might make a little surge when it went public. Huston was a damned sardine fisherman. Looking for lots of sardines to make a damned sandwich.
Finally, she answered in a cool, efficient, but very feminine voice.
“Anybody around?” he asked.
“Well, Carl’s still in his office. He’s about to leave.”
“When he does, you’ll come in?”
“If I have time.”
“It’s on my calendar. Don’t be late.” With an impatient flick of his wrist, he snapped the receiver back onto its cradle and leaned back in his chair to watch more lights come on in the city, peering to his right to see the bobbing gleam of the boats plying the slate gray waters just off Fisherman’s Wharf. His clock’s numerals now glowed with seven-one-eight. Eighteen minutes late! He turned on the desk lamp, which cast a nice soft kind of glow over the office, without spoiling the view of the city lights. He watched the view for a moment.
The door opened and the New Accounts Officer came in. She wore a conservative burgundy skirt with a matching jacket over a silk blouse. Her medium blonde hair was done up in a twirly bun with a bow that matched the skirt. She always dressed well. She also wore high heels, which accented the shape of her slim calves. Most women wore more comfortable low heels, which he thought looked dowdy. She approached his desk and the line-of-sight clock read seven-two-zero. Plenty of time.
“You wanted to see me?” She smiled, the smooth skin around her green eyes crinkling. Her straight, white teeth contrasted with the nice red of her carefully applied lipstick.
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