Analog SFF, November 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  And it did not make the joy less real. “Can you stay a little while?” I asked, afraid my voice might sound like a little boy's.

  Until dawn, one of the most powerful people in human space took several hours off to watch me pace and listen to me rant, sometimes to her, sometimes at her. We both knew that nothing I said really meant anything, that it was her listening and not my speaking that counted right now, and we knew what her listening said without either of us having to say the embarrassing words.

  When I finally ran down, she steered me back upstairs, told me to send notice to the musicians to extend their break indefinitely, authorized the OSP to pay them for their idle days, and said, “Now go to bed and stay there, and don't set any alarms.” She was right, as she so often was, so I only argued for about five minutes, before accepting a final hug, tumbling into bed, and sleeping like a dead man.

  Copyright (c) John Barnes

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  * * *

  Novelette: The Case of the Contumacious Qubit by Thomas R. Dulski

  You never know where a purely routine task may lead—especially if you get mixed up with someone like Baker!

  I can't say that I was overjoyed at forced retirement at 59 1/2 years of age. I had given nearly three decades of reasonably dedicated service to the research laboratory of Monash Chemical, a small-cap niche-market manufacturer of bulk specialty chemicals. Over that span I'd obtained a few patents and published some technical articles; I had even seen some of my work make a sizeable, albeit short-lived, profit for the company. True, I had had to endure an onerous burden of lab politics, corporate policy fads, and humiliating performance appraisals by fatuous, and often captious, young MBAs. But the work had been interesting for the most part, and I had fully expected to continue there until mandatory retirement at age 70.

  But it was not to be. The world economy had once again yielded to unseen forces and cloaked interests and the general call was for another up-tick to even higher levels of productivity—read: work force reductions.

  And so there I was in suburban Philadelphia with rather more time on my hands than I was accustomed to, and with a bit more marital togetherness than either my wife or I were fully comfortable with. Marcia had been a good deal more shocked by this development than I. And now that the initial reaction had subsided she had taken to leaving the newspaper open to the job listings. While I explained to her that I didn't feel particularly challenged by an opportunity to collect shopping carts in a strip mall parking lot, the objection did not seem to impress her. My pension was not lordly, but we were hardly in desperate straits. Yet Marcia rarely missed an occasion to point out some octogenarian delivering newspapers.

  I was paging through a copy of Consulting for Dimwits and musing over my plight one morning when the phone rang. It was a fellow named Carstairs that I knew from professional society meetings. It seemed that he was an organizer for a local student science fair in New Jersey. The event was to be held at a small college in a few days time and they were short of judges. Word had gotten to him that I had recently been shown the door at Monash and would I consider coming up for a day or two to judge the senior chemistry exhibits? It was a bit of a drive, but I was feeling the need for lebensraum at this point so I rather hastily accepted.

  The following Monday morning, throwing together a one-suiter of assorted clothes, I announced to Marcia that I'd made some professional contacts about a consulting assignment and would be out of town for a few days. I'd take the Sentra and leave her the van.

  I used my AARP card to obtain a reasonable rate at a clean but modest motel near Ptolard University. The soda vending machine in the hallway was out of order so I settled for a glass of ice water and fell asleep watching the Weather Channel.

  The next morning I breakfasted on a bowl of oatmeal at a nearby restaurant and walked to the college gymnasium, which had been transformed for the science fair. What seemed like acres of canvas had been laid down to protect the polished hardwood floor of the basketball court. Row upon row of folding tables had been set up, each covered with brown wrapping paper upon which sat a sea of science fair exhibits. I noted that each exhibit space had been marked with cryptic alphanumeric codes. And the long rows of tables had each been decorated with large banners declaring categories like “Seventh Grade Junior Science” and “Senior Biology."

  As I entered this arena I noticed only a scattering of individuals nosing among the exhibits, but there seemed to be a large gathering at the far end of the hall, beneath one of the retracted basketball backboards. From that general area I perceived the aroma of freshly brewed coffee. I quickened my pace past the empty bleacher seats, noting that the main attractant appeared to be several large boxes of donuts of various styles and flavors. Arriving in the queue I poured a cup from one of the urns, doctored it with powdered creamer, and reached toward a cream-filled pastry.

  “Very bad for the low density lipids, Woodside. I suggest the whole wheat."

  It was Baker, a man whom I had not seen for twenty years. I was transfixed for a moment, regarding this visage from the past. He was a bit gray now but otherwise pretty much identical to my very vivid memory of him: tall and thin, almost gaunt one might say, somewhat sallow of complexion with an aquiline nose, thin lips, and with a decidedly redoubtable air. Some might say that he radiated a dignified, professorial aspect. Except that I knew him for a fact to be nuttier than the proverbial walnut grove.

  Upon graduation from college—more years ago now than I care to remember—I had accepted a position as Dr. Oliver Wendell Baker's special assistant in the firm, Baker Associates. It had entailed hours of drudgery, a little forensic lab work, and several hair-raising adventures. The man believes himself to be ... well, let that rest for now. But after five years of that I had sent out a number of resumes and had landed the position at Monash. However, that hadn't prevented him from embroiling me in a particularly dangerous case involving a chemist's money cache and another humiliating encounter at a landfill in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Over the following years, time had dimmed those experiences, but I had never quite lost the somewhat distracting thought that our paths might cross again. It was not that I disliked the man, but my affection was rather like that for a loony uncle whom you would rather not introduce to the neighbors.

  I must confess that I stammered a bit as I grabbed for the whole wheat. “Baker—somehow, I would never have expected to see you here.” I gestured, falteringly, with the donut. We shook hands amid a small cloud of powdered sugar and I quickly explained my current situation.

  Baker sniffed and looked about the large room. “Actually, I have been engaged here on more than one occasion. Naturally, I fully condone the encouragement of youth in the path of science. Although, I must say that I don't always agree with the circus atmosphere of competition.” He sipped at a plastic cup of steaming tea. “However, today I am here on business. I expect to meet a client here this afternoon."

  “A teacher?"

  “No, actually a student. A high school student named Randal Biederbeck who left an urgent message at my e-mail address."

  I bit into the donut to cover my surprise. “You have an e-mail address?"

  “A hyperlink from my website. Really, Woodside, you don't imagine that one in my line can afford to turn their back on the times.” At this point Baker adjusted his deerstalker cap. “Come along, old fellow, and let's see what sort of exhibit this young man has come up with."

  It was useless to protest and I began to dutifully follow my former employer. Beset with familiar feelings—a déjà vu of being sucked into a Charybdis of involuntary involvement—I took furtive bites from the donut.

  We passed a myriad of student science exhibits as I scurried to keep pace with Baker's long strides. As we walked I noted several recurrent themes with only minor variations: commercial consumer product comparisons, electrochemistry, and cultural folklore seemed most prominent. There was: the onion-slices-floating-in-pools-of-mouthwash leitm
otif, the grape-juice-stained-cloths-treated-with-assortments-of-laundry-detergents refrain, and the potato-or-lemon-or-whatever-battery lyric. And then there were the interrogative titles, hand-lettered or computer-generated across the top of the pasteboard displays: “Which Metals Corrode Faster?,” “Does Music Help Plants Grow?” (tomato seedlings in paper cups), “Which Paper Towel Absorbs Best?,” “Is the Polymerase Chain Reaction the ‘Key’ to Public-Key Cryptography?” This last title brought me up short, and, in fact, it was exactly where Baker had stopped to await me. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Interesting theme, eh, Woodside? And this student is our—I mean my client."

  Before leaving home I had read the multi-page e-mail attachment that Carstairs had sent. The students were to arrive at 1 pm, but great pains were taken to avoid any suggestion of bias by the judges. The judging rules had emphatically stated that the students’ names were not to be used or associated in any way with their projects throughout the judging process. All projects were assigned an identifying code number by the science fair administrators. “Your client, this Randal boy, told you the title of his project, then?” I offered.

  Baker drained his plastic teacup. “Not at all, Woodside. I merely deduced the topic he would choose from the communication he sent. Would you care to see it?” He retrieved a printout from his coat pocket.

  I unfolded the paper and read:

  “Hi:

  My name is Randy (Randal) Biederbeck. I saw your cool website (neat graphics and I dig the weird violin music!) and thought you could help me. My Great-Aunt Hypatia is a neat lady who has been helping me with math and science and stuff, you know? See, I'm in high school and she's like a professor or something at a college. She got me stuff and showed me how to work some of the equipment in her lab. She got me that Kary guy's book and a bunch of magazine articles and she checked my spelling for the science fair project. Only now she left her job, really sudden like. She said that she was going to be gone for a while, only it didn't sound like her. Funny like, you know? So I'm worried about her. It's been over six weeks now and nobody's heard from her. Mom says not to worry, that her sister has gone off on her own like this before, but this doesn't feel right to me somehow. I know she's a flake and all, but could we talk about it? I'll be at the Newark Science Fair on Monday. I'll be wearing my purple riboflavin tie. Mom says I've got to wear a tie.

  Sincerely,

  Randy Biederbeck"

  I took rather long to hand back the sheet, having re-read it several times in an attempt to find the clue that had led Baker to this rather sophisticated exhibit. “Kary book?” I said at last.

  “Precisely, Woodside. Very good. Kary B. Mullis shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for the development of the Polymerase Chain Reaction or ‘PCR’ technique of DNA replication."

  I finished the last bite of the whole-wheat donut, mutely wishing for another turn at the coffee urn. “That's rather out of my line,” I said. “What about the purple tie?"

  “You've hit upon it again, Woodside. A specialty manufacturer has issued a line of neck-ware that depicts the UV light image of various colorful crystals, vitamins among them, as a decorative feature. It's another indication of an interest in biochemistry."

  I glanced over the exhibit. There was a rack containing a collection of half-filled test tubes, some photographs of rather sophisticated-looking laboratory instruments, and two bound notebooks, one containing a massive file of raw data computer print-outs, the other a tersely written account of the project. Not a particularly engaging first impression, except, of course, for the fact that the topic was extremely advanced for a high school student.

  I was most keenly aware that I had violated one of the basic rules of the contest and should dutifully disqualify myself from judging the exhibit since I knew the name of the student. However, I convinced myself that my prior involvement with Baker and his current interest in this young man's plight should not in any way affect my objectivity.

  It was at this point that the loudspeakers blared a call for the judges to assemble in the bleachers for a final briefing. I took my leave of Baker, who was already musing over the Biederbeck boy's display.

  As one of six “Senior Chemistry” judges I was given a packet of pre-printed cards, each headed with a project number code. Glancing over the top card, I noted the list of judging criteria. I was to grade the corresponding project on a scale of 1 to 10 in about a half-dozen rather nebulous and somewhat overlapping critical categories: “Originality,” “Creativity,” “Scientific Thought,” “Presentation,” and a few others. And on the bottom half of the card I was to grade from 1 to 5 on a similar group of more objective criteria: “Spelling,” “Grammar,” “Use of References,” and the like.

  Although I was not completely comfortable with the subjective categories on the cards, it proved to be an interesting way to spend a morning. I proceeded from project to project, paging through reports and scrutinizing postered graphs, examining the occasional artifact intended to illustrate a key point, or a line of photographs depicting mostly kitchen table lab work.

  As I worked my way through the card deck I began to realize that there were quite distinct categories of exhibits for which there was no recognition amid the judging criteria. There were the projects designed to demonstrate some well-known principle of science. Many of these could have been transcribed from a science fair project book. (I had noted several such books in my frequent perusals of Philadelphia-area bookstores.) More genuine, somehow, were those projects that seemed to resonate with the student's personal interests ("What's in Lipstick?,” “Octane Number and Compression Ratio"). There were those projects that seemed to be done as a school assignment, complete with the obsequious teacher acknowledgement ("Thanks to my teacher, Mr.—” with the name censured with black marker by the fair authorities). And there were those obviously completed with major assistance from a relative who worked in an industrial, academic, or government laboratory.

  On (disappointingly) few occasions there was an honest attempt at the scientific method: the formal statement of a testable hypothesis ("I believe the vinegar will give the highest voltage because it is more acid than the lemon juice"), and the diplomatic admission of error ("My hypothesis was incorrect—the vinegar and lemon juice gave the same voltage").

  In these days of sophisticated word-processing software, spelling and grammar were not much of a problem (with the notable exception of technical terms). References were most commonly Encarta entries, although I noticed a few books and journal articles, as well as an occasional “personal communication” from a local university professor.

  As I wended my path through the chemistry projects I found myself repeatedly casting glances toward Baker, who remained absorbed in Randy Biederbeck's exhibit. I had been saving that project for last in my deck of cards, although I had noted from time to time several of my fellow judges shouldering Baker aside to study it at length. When I finally got to it, it was noon and the caterers had begun to assemble a cold buffet for the judges’ lunch.

  Baker was pensive as I approached, holding his chin and tapping his cheek with a long index finger.

  “Well, Woodside, what have you made of the competition?"

  I shrugged. “It's not too bad, really. One of them used a chemical equation,” I remarked, “although it wasn't balanced."

  “I believe that you will find Master Biederbeck's project quite different."

  I looked about nervously. “No names please, Baker,” I whispered.

  “Quite so. Nevertheless, it is a remarkable piece of work."

  And, indeed, it was.

  Deoxyribonucleic acid, the cell's information storage medium, contains millions of codons—sequences of the nucleotides: adenine (A), thymine (T), cytosine (C), and guanine (G)—containing precise instructions for the synthesis of proteins. Other codons control the replication and transcription sequence itself. Still other codons may perform functions as yet unidentified. But for a long time it has be
en believed that the massive double helix contains extensive non-coding regions—blank pages, as it were, in a set of programmed instructions. This young man's premise was that these non-coding regions could be used to insert and transmit coded messages.

  A segment of denatured (that is, unwound and separated) DNA would be snipped out of one of these non-coding regions. So-called primers—synthesized duplicates of the nucleotide sequence on either side of the selected segment—allow it to be identified and manipulated. An artificial sequence of nucleotides is synthesized—letters, numbers, and punctuation encoded by three units (for example, ATC = A, GCT = B, etc.)—and bracketed by the primer sequence. This is then inserted into the original DNA strand, and the message is buried in a mass of denatured DNA. The resultant solution could be dried to a dot over the letter “i” in a typed letter. The letter's recipient, with the appropriate primer solution, supplies of DNA polymerase, and the four nucleotides could replicate a million copies of the coded message and read it out easily using a DNA sequencer instrument. It appeared to be a foolproof form of cryptography.

  I spent a full half hour going through the typed report. Randal Biederbeck had quite obviously had access to some fairly sophisticated laboratory equipment. There were photos of DNA synthesizers and DNA sequence analyzers along with a brief biography of their prime inventor, Leroy Hood. Other photographs showed robotically controlled pipetting stations, and bottles of reagents not likely to be found in any high school chemistry lab. Thumbing through the thick stack of bound printouts, which remained completely obscure to me, I also realized that the Biederbeck boy had had access to some advanced specialized software. His prime object had apparently been to implant the message, “Go Lions!” (his high school football team, perhaps?) in a microdot of DNA. And he had evidently succeeded since the last data page bore that message.

  I stood back from the exhibit and let out a long breath.